Worse

January 19, 2010 at 7:33 pm (Uncategorized)
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There is no shortage of heartbreak felt for the people of Haiti.  I cannot add any more expressions of grief than has already been added.

I will say, though, that this seems to be a great moment when churches can unite, across nuances of belief, to aid those in such desperation.  It seems quite easy to unite when there is a common need for sustenance, while, at the same time, quite difficult to unite amidst what would be seen by some as angled interpretations of the story of God.

Today, reading and researching for a small group discussion guide centered around pain and loss, the following story found its way to me, and my heart broke again, at a situation that only seems to be getting worse.

Danger Grows for Haitian Girls Amidst Chaos
by Leslie Scrivener
for TheStar.com

Long before the earthquake struck, long before the schools where they could be safe crumbled, girls and young women were the most vulnerable in Haiti.

Now, in the aftermath of a disaster, there are greater fears for girls’ safety in a country where hundreds of thousands of children live as indentured slaves and the poorest girls in Port-au-Prince slums are targets of gang rape.

“My worry is we put a lot of effort into bringing relief, but we have to have some protective measures to benefit women and girls to avoid their being victimized and sexually assaulted. It was already difficult in ordinary times,” said Gerardo Ducos, Haiti researcher for Amnesty International.

A Haitian women’s organization documented 238 rapes in an 18-month period ending June 2008: 140 of those were girls aged 19 months to 18 years.

Prosecutions for rape, which became a criminal offence only in 2005, are pitifully few. The Guardian newspaper reported in a documentary film last year only 12 rape cases went to trial and that the police unit in charge of child protection has only 12 officers for 4 million children.

“I am not able to go to the police because I am really frightened,” a girl named Stephanie, who was raped during carnival in February 2007, told Amnesty International. “The attackers really pressured me not to report them although I don’t know them. This is all so humiliating. I had to stay quiet.”

A girl named Laure described to Amnesty International how her landlord forced her to have sex – sometimes at gunpoint – so her family would not be evicted. When Laure’s mother complained to the police, she was beaten up and Laure was raped again.

Girls and women in Haiti need support more than ever, says Yifat Susskind, policy and communications director for MADRE, a women’s rights organization based in New York. They become the caretakers in a crisis, responsible for the weakest, she says, adding it is often on the shoulders of women that a country is rebuilt.

“They need support commensurate to the burden they are carrying. Instead, we see women and girls are targeted in all sorts of way, especially gender violence.”

Noting the collapse of the central prison, she said social norms that keep people’s behaviour in check may disappear in a national disaster. “The fabric of society is destroyed and the controls that people internalize against rape, incest, reacting to the slightest provocation by beating the hell out of someone, go, too. One of the ugly things of human nature is that a pecking order emerges in any crisis …”

There are also more tangible losses for women and girls, she added.

“Her grandmother, the one person (a girl) could go to for protection or solace – she doesn’t know if she is dead or alive. Her school, the one safe place she could go every day is destroyed. … “

While enrolment of girls in school appears at first to be higher than that of boys, many girls drop out after three months, Ducos, a Canadian, said from England. They enrol the next year, then drop out again, often to look after younger siblings or tend to domestic chores.

UNICEF estimated 100,000 Haitian girls were in domestic service in 2007, while a CARE report says the number could be double that.

Impoverished families may turn their children over to other families, where there is at least hope of food and shelter. Few receive an education. These children are known as restavek, from the French rester avec, or “to stay with.” The pejorative term implies their families abandoned them.

Amnesty also reports a trend toward brokers who search for children, especially those in large families, “enticing them to give up their children by making empty promises of a brighter future for them.”

Susskind said, “If you feel your child is at risk of starvation, you give them to a house where they have a chance. … things you never think a mother would do are her single best option.”

And there is another concern. “What will happen with the orphans?” asked Ducos. “We know there was trafficking of children out of Haiti, fake orphanages operating illegally and trafficking to the Dominican Republic where orphans beg in the streets. Orphans in the wake of the earthquake could be another human catastrophe.”

Three girls aged 18 and 19, who lived at an all-girls orphanage founded by retired Windsor detective Frank Chauvin, have died in the earthquake. A staff member is reported dead and two are missing.

Le Foyer des Filles de Dieu, home to 70 girls aged 3 to 19, appears to have suffered only cracks, Chauvin said. He and a Haitian educator started the orphanage in 1987 after he visited a bleak detention centre for abandoned children.

“When I opened the door, I saw 125 little girls sitting there in the hot sun. There was nothing in there,” he recalled. “My idea was to get these girls into an organization, teach them how to read and write so if they left they could look after themselves.

“Before, they had no chance to go to school,” said Chauvin, 76, who has 10 children and is a member of the Order of Canada. “They are children for a few years and then they have to do the work of a woman and carry on.”

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Affair

January 11, 2010 at 7:08 pm (Uncategorized)
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Andy Warhol.  The most influential artist of the last 100 years.  He loved his television.

Steven Shaviro writes about Warhol, and in particular, about how Warhol succeeded in killing his emotions, believing that their death resulted in his ability to artisticly produce, and reproduce anything, without any emotional attachment.

In the article, which was published in Criticism, in 2004, Shaviro writes that Warhol attritubted the death of his emotions to his love affair with his available technology.  Here is what Shaviro writes, as his article draws from a great deal of autobiographical information about Warhol:

Warhol’s account of the loss of his emotional life–leaving aside his sense of satisfaction at the prospect–has since become a commonplace in discussions of postmodern culture. Thus J. G. Ballard writes of “the death of affect” under the influence of the last century’s new technologies and media.  In a somewhat different way, Fredric Jameson also posits “the waning of affect” in postmodernism.  And of course, Jean Baudrillard’s work is all about how “the cool universe of digitality” has eclipsed the real, “the ‘cool’ cybernetic phase supplanting the ‘hot’ and phantasmatic.”  The argument goes something like this: Thanks to the new electronic technologies, the world has become a single global marketplace. Universal commodity fetishism has colonized lived experience. The real has been murdered by its representations. Every object has been absorbed into its own image. There is no longer (if there ever was) any such thing as a single, stable self. Subjectivity has broken into multiple fragments, and the high modernist endeavor to totalize these fragments, to redeem them, to bring them back together again, is a futile and meaningless exercise. The death of emotion is concomitant with all these other losses.

… The experience of television is intimate and cozy. I watch it at home, alone, or in the company of immediate family members and close friends. Rather than making everything seem larger than life, TV miniaturizes experience. It shrinks everything down to my own size. It squeezes the world into the confines of my living room. Television addresses me directly–not from on high, but almost as an equal. It doesn’t overpower me in the way that movies do. Nor does it keep me stupefied and glued to my seat. Most of the time I watch it distractedly while I am also doing other things. The frequent commercials also break up the flow: they give me a chance to get up and go to the bathroom or to do additional household chores. And often I am not even committed to one specific program: the remote is always close at hand, and I can change channels whenever I like. For all these reasons, television is beautiful, and not sublime. It captivates me with its vaguely reassuring presence rather than taking me outside of myself with extreme displays of passion.

Of his article, though, this is the passage that that bothers me most:

In his 1965 book Understanding Media, McLuhan argues that television is a quintessentially “cool” medium, in contrast to the way that radio and the movies are “hot.”  Television doesn’t overwhelm us with shocks; rather, it invites us and cajoles us. It is a part of our everyday experience; it quietly insinuates itself into our personal lives. We get so deeply involved with television precisely because it doesn’t imperiously demand our attention. It is simply there, day in and day out, like wallpaper or a piece of furniture. Television is “cool” in the sense that it lowers emotional intensity. It makes the extraordinary seem ordinary, whereas hot media, such as the movies, do just the reverse. Often we think of TV viewing as passive, but McLuhan rightly insists that it is highly participatory and interactive. After all, we talk back to the television, we cut it off, we ignore it, we fight with it and make up with it again, just as we do with our spouses and our siblings. Television is a continually running, low-intensity domestic drama, without the cosmic heights and sublime depths of tragedy.

This is why Warhol says that he has pursued an ongoing “affair with [his] television” and why he calls his tape recorder his “wife.” [Warhol used his tape recorder to record his conversations, or interactions, on a regular basis.] With their help, he was able to domesticate and resolve all the “problems” that other people were always dumping in his lap. The TV and the tape recorder were far more effective than psychotherapy, he says: “I kept the TV on all the time, especially while people were telling me their problems, and the television I found to be just diverting enough so the problems people told me didn’t really affect me any more. It was like some kind of magic.” With the TV on, no problem can be desperate or urgent any longer. Whatever it is, it’s just part of the flow. Television thus gives us that “certain angle” of vision from which it becomes impossible ever to take emotions seriously again.

No problem can be desperate or urgent any longer.  Do you agree with Warhol?

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Fast

December 29, 2009 at 3:27 pm (Uncategorized)
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Of the more moving events we host in our student ministry, my favorites are our media fasts.      

(It is another discussion, altogether different, as to how a break from media can almost be the same as a fast from food, but that, my friend, is another topic.) 

Can you do without this for just one day?

The latest data, provided by The Harris Interactive poll, shows that the average online user spends about 13 hours a week on the Internet.  (Again, to show the power of the Internet, the word Internet keeps begging to be capitalized in most word processing, spell-check programs.) 

And the 350 million members of Facebook spend about 10 billion minutes there every day — that is a staggering number. 

Last spring, after some prayer, and some research, I decided to ask our students to fast from their media usage.  It was a simple challenge — for a time of 24 hours, we asked our teenagers to put down all media devices that used a screen.  It was met with a great deal of enthusiasm, but this first fast was really just a challenge.  Put down the device.  Just for awhile.  One of our students told me later that that 24-hour time period really changed his life, and gave him a great moment to think and reflect.  

We’ve hosted the fast again, at the beginning of our fall semester, asking our students to again fast from their media devices for 24 hours, and this time we included a list of prayer ideas to fill the time.  And as this semester dawns, we will be again be challenging our students to fast again for 24 hours, asking for divine intervention into their lives, their relationships, and their time. 

I am encouraged, then, to find that this sort of idea is becoming more popular.  I read this post, just last week, of a college who asked their students to attend vespers, asking them to put down their cell phones for just a small amount of time.  The service was only attended by a few, but it was a start. 

College Asks Students to Power Down, Contemplate
by Alan Scher Zagier
for The Washington Post 

COLUMBIA, Mo. — Dianne Lynch wanted to give the students of Stephens College a break from the constant digital communication that pervades their generation. So she asked them to put their phones and computers away and revive the 176-year-old school’s dormant tradition of vespers services. 

On a bitterly cold December night, with the start of final exams just hours away, about 75 of Stephens’ 766 undergraduates grudgingly piled their cell phones into collection baskets and filed into the school’s candlelit chapel, where they did little but sit, silently. For an hour, not an iPod ear bud could be seen. There were no fingers flying on tiny computer keyboards, no chats with unseen intimates. 

Alexis Dornseif, a senior from suburban St. Louis majoring in fashion marketing and management, said she needed time away from her busy life. 

“Sometimes it’s really overwhelming,” she said. “It’s good to have time to think, to not worry about what’s going on tomorrow.” 

Lynch, the president of the women’s college, is no technophobe. Her doctorate research focused on “digital natives,” teenagers who grew up with “the Internet as a part of their operating assumption in the world.” She knows most of her students consider their cell phones a social necessity. The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project has found that 82 percent of 16- and 17-year-olds own cell phones. Ninety-four percent of teens spend time online. 

But Lynch fears all that time spent in the 21st century’s town square leaves few opportunities for clutter-free thought. She wants the students to also pursue the more elusive state of mind that comes with silence. 

Several other schools are encouraging technology-free introspection. Amherst College in Massachusetts hosted a “Day of Mindfulness” this year, featuring yoga and meditation and a lecture on information technology and the contemplative mind entitled “No Time to Think.” 

“Students welcome it,” said Amherst physics professor Arthur Zajonc, director of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. “It’s a complement to the very hurried world of gadgets they normally live in.” 

At Stephens, Lynch hit on the idea for reviving vespers after an alumnae group regaled her with fond memories of Sunday nights in the school chapel. Once a Baptist school but now secular, Stephens required vespers services as often as four times each week starting in 1920. 

“Just a wonderful opportunity to calm down,” said Neel Stallings, a career-development consultant in Charlotte, N.C., who graduated from Stephens in 1967. “To have a place to go to just tune out all of the extra noise, and to tune into yourself, was the most valuable thing.” 

By the late 1960s, vespers had become more spiritual than religious, no longer mandatory and held only once a week. By the 1980s the program was gone. 

The new vespers program is voluntary, at least for now. Lynch hopes to have the services twice a month, to reinforce the school’s mission of teaching young women to be self-reliant. 

“You will need to be able to sit, to be quiet, to be alone with yourself, to have those moments of self-reflection,” she said. 

Those moments are infrequent on the modern college campus. Seconds after the end of the first revived vespers service, students got their cell phones back, and the flickering assortment of screens replaced the need for mood-setting candlelight. 

As the new year begins, I challenge you to the same.  Unplug from the matrix.  Fill that time with prayer, with readings, and with clarity.  God longs to fill the vacuum in your life.  

But you’ll need to make room for Him first.

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Only

December 23, 2009 at 2:31 pm (Uncategorized)
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Finally, a cappella music gets its due.

This clip is from the NBC show The Sing-Off, the show which showcased voices-only groups. 

This group, Voices of Lee, took third place … but should have taken first.  This is their cover of “No One,” by Alicia Keys.  The lead is phenomenal, but the bgv’s are outstanding.  Take a listen.

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Crisis

December 15, 2009 at 6:25 pm (Uncategorized)
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A Christmas Crisis?

Americans spend $450,000,000,000, in just thirty days, for the Christmas holiday.  And moneysupermarket.com claims that four out of five people will unwrap presents they neither want, or need. 

We are in a Christmas crisis.  Perhaps there is value in this post, then:

“You Shouldn’t Have:  The Economic Argument For Never Giving Another Gift”
by Joel Waldfogel
for Slate Magazine

With just three weeks till Christmas, the Red Bull-infused phase of the holiday shopping season is upon us. If recent history is any guide, the month of December alone—with just 8 percent of the year’s shopping days—will bring 23 percent of the year’s sales at jewelry stores, 16 percent at department stores, and 15 percent at electronics stores. U.S. December retail sales can be expected to exceed sales in other months by $65 billion. Finally, some good news for the economy. Or maybe not.

Normally—during the 11 non-December months of the year—I’ll spend $50 on something only if it’s worth at least $50 to me. Typically, measures of spending provide a lower-bound on the value of the satisfaction that buyers expect to reap from their purchases. While some of our own purchases ultimately disappoint, we generally buy well for ourselves, so using spending as a barometer of consumer satisfaction makes sense. Spending on gifts is different. When I set out to spend $50 on you, I operate at a significant disadvantage. I’m not certain about what you have or what you want, so when I spend $50 on a gift, I may buy something worth nothing to you. There’s no guarantee that consumer satisfaction meets, exceeds, or even comes close to the amount spent on the gift.

How much satisfaction do we purchase with the $65 billion worth of stuff we put under the tree? Over the past 15 years, I’ve done a lot of surveys asking gift recipients about the items they’ve received: Who bought it? What did the buyer pay? What’s the most you would have been willing to pay for it? Based on these surveys, I’ve concluded that we value items we receive as gifts 20 percent less, per dollar spent, than items we buy for ourselves. Given the $65 billion in U.S. holiday spending per year, that means we get $13 billion less in satisfaction than we would receive if we spent that money the usual way—carefully, on ourselves. Americans celebrate the holidays with an orgy of value destruction. Worldwide, the waste is almost twice as large.

But doesn’t this analysis ignore the joy of giving? you ask. Can’t that joy make up for the inefficiency of gift giving? Let’s consider an example. Your Aunt Mildred buys you a $50 sweater. You don’t hate it, but you don’t love it, either. In all likelihood, you’d have bought it for yourself only if it was a steal—let’s say you’d have been willing to pay no more than $30 for it. So far, her gift appears to destroy value. But suppose Mildred got joy in giving the gift, and while it would be hard to do so with any precision, let’s suppose we can attach a dollar value to Mildred’s joy. For the sake of discussion, let’s say it’s another $30. That would bring the total benefit of the transaction to $60, $10 more than its cost. But wait: If Aunt Mildred got the same joy from giving you a sweater you actually wanted—worth its $50 price tag to you—then the transaction could have created $80 in value. Relative to this, the bad gift misses out on $20 worth of satisfaction. So even accounting for the joy of giving, our gift-giving is inefficient. Of course, it’s also possible that Mildred enjoys giving you only sweaters you do not like, but if so, then Mildred is a sadist. And I doubt that sadism motivates the vast lot of gift giving.

It’s bad enough that we buy a lot of stuff that no one wants. It turns out we buy it using money we don’t yet have. It wasn’t always this way. In the 1930s, almost 10 percent of Christmas spending was financed with money squirreled away into Christmas clubs—bank accounts paying little interest but helping consumers save for the holiday. Participants promised to contribute weekly, frequently as little as $0.25 at a time. These accounts were popular because they helped even unsophisticated consumers—many of whom didn’t have another bank account—avoid the temptation to fritter their money away. Since 1970, by contrast, the explosive growth in consumer credit has had the opposite effect, helping consumers fall prey to their lack of self-control when it comes to borrowing. In recent years, one-third of holiday spending is still not paid off two months after Christmas.

Hold on there! Isn’t spending good for the economy? The economy consists of buyers and sellers. In normal transactions, the seller gets a price exceeding his cost and therefore makes some profit, while the buyer gets an item she values at or above its price (in which case the buyer receives some surplus). A well-functioning market maximizes the joint surplus experienced by sellers and buyers. With gift giving, the seller still gets his profit, but the ultimate consumer (the gift recipient) gets an item that produces less satisfaction than an equal amount of spending would have led to if she had purchased an item for herself. So, is holiday spending good for the economy? It’s good for sellers, but it’s not sufficiently good at producing satisfaction for the ultimate consumers. And most of us are, after all, consumers rather than sellers.

Second, while cash is in principle an appealing gift, as it allows the recipient to choose something she actually wants, it’s considered tacky in our culture. Gift cards are probably the next best thing, although you need to be careful about fees and about losing them. Gift cards would be even better if their unspent balances—10 percent of spending by some accounts—went automatically to charity after a few years. With about $80 billion in annual gift card sales, there’s $8 billion at stake here.

OK, Professor Scrooge, I can’t really just not give anyone gifts—do you have any advice for how to give better gifts? First off, keep giving gifts to people you know well and see often, especially kids. When you know your recipients’ wants and needs, your gifts are far less likely to destroy value. Gifts from givers in daily or weekly contact are, on average, about 10 percent more satisfying, per dollar spent, than those from givers in only monthly or yearly contact. In fact, the right gift can, in some circumstances, be even more satisfying than what the recipient would have done with cash. While textbook economics views people as fully aware of all the things they might like to buy, in reality our friends sometimes know about things we’d like before we learn of them. In those situations, well-chosen gifts can allow us to enjoy wonderful items that we did not know existed.

Finally, gifts to charity on behalf of recipients deserve a look. Such gifts can allow your friends and family to experience a luxury they probably can’t usually afford. While luxury evokes images of jewelry and fancy chocolates, if you look at household spending data, one of the clearest luxuries—that is, an item whose share of expenditure rises with income—is charitable giving. So charity gift cards (offered by Charity Navigator or TisBest.org), which allow recipients to choose which charity gets the money, make it possible for recipients to act like rich guys, while transferring resources to high-value uses. Admittedly, these would be terrible gifts for 11-year-old boys, but they may be an ideal way to fulfill your giving obligations with other adults. Like it or not, we are about to go on our annual holiday spending sprees. That spending can be a force for waste or a force for good. Think twice before you put that sweater on your Visa.

Joel Waldfogel is the Ehrenkranz professor of business and public policy at the Wharton School. This article is drawn from his new book, Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays.

For another take, visit The Advent Conspiracy.  You’ll be glad you did.

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Blue

December 10, 2009 at 9:56 pm (Uncategorized)
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Morpheus holds out his hands, with two pills.  One blue.  The other red.  His sunglasses cannot hide his smile, his look, as he knows his offer to Neo would not be rejected.  Lightning screams with violent cracks, and flashes through the curtained windows, and the glass of water on the table beckons.

Morpheus then speaks.  “This is your last chance.  After this, there is no turning back.  You take the blue pill — the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.  You take the red pill — you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.”

__________

I think of that quote often.  I wrote a discussion guide for our small group leaders a couple of weeks ago about our online identities, and the more I read, and researched, the more alarmed I became.    

The story was about the decline of privacy through the increasing wave of the digital world, as it sweeps over our lives.   An entire American generation has taken the blue pill, and has become part of a stream of information, in a cyber world, that is never-ending, chosing to remain a part of what could very well be called the matrix.

Every data, every text, every tweet, every status update, every email, every uploaded picture or video, is now cemented in the vaults of servers, from individual IP addresses.

Every bit of digital information is thought-based, though.  Everything uploaded has to be premeditated, which means even the awful things we put online must undergo some thought process.  Stories emerge constantly of people regretting their online posts.  And I think more and more people will, one day, wish they had taken the red pill.  Because as our world grows more and more comfortable with avatars and tweets, in the chance that we could have greater connections with others through a digital world, we are also growing more and more disconnected.  Life is now lived on a computer screen, with children spending, on average, six hours in front of some kind of screen every day.

So when I read this article, all of these thoughts washed around in my head.  There is a trend now, of people unplugging, or going offline, or, in essence, taking the red pill, and are wanting to disconnect from this strange world of keyboards and screens and updates. 

Be warned, though.  The story is a little bizarre, but the intent is interesting. 

‘Anti-social network’ claims to be a Facebook killer app
by Rory Mulholland
AFP.com/ Yahoo news

Facebook makes you despair? Social networking makes you want to end it all? You may be ready for online ritual suicide with the aid of a new website that helps you kill your virtual identity.

“Impress your friends, disconnect yourself,” is the slogan on www.seppukoo.com, a site that aims to subvert Facebook by offering its millions of users a glorious end and a memorial page to match.

“Rather than fall into the hands of their enemies, ancient Japanese samurai preferred to die with honour, voluntarily plunging a sword into the abdomen and moving it left to right in a slicing motion,” the site notes.

This form of ritual suicide was known as “seppuku.”

“As the seppuku restores the samurai’s honour as a warrior, seppukoo.com deals with the liberation of the digital body,” the site says.

Today the enemy is not other bands of noble warriors but corporate media who use viral marketing to make huge profits by connecting people across the globe.

“Seppukoo playfully attempts to subvert this mechanism by disconnecting people from each other and transforming the individual suicide experience into an exciting ’social’ experience.”

The site, which uses its own viral marketing strategy to lure in disgruntled social networkers, is part of a protest wave that sees Facebook as a potentially dangerous entity beholden to corporate interests. 

It offers ritual suicide for Facebook users in five easy steps.

Willing victims must first log in to seppukoo.com by typing in the same information they use to go on to their Facebook profile. 

They then choose one of several memorial RIP page templates before writing their last words, which the site promises to send to all their Facebook friends when they have taken the final step.

Once the user has made that fatal final click, his or her Facebook profile is deactivated.

But in what might be seen as a bit of a cheat, virtual life goes on after the ritual suicide.

It comes in the form of testimonials friends can write on the memorial page or by rising in the seppukoo ranks by scoring points with every former Facebook friend who follows your lead and commits hara-kari.

The top scorer in that game is currently a blonde woman who uses the name Simona Lodi and who passed into the post-Facebook world on November 5. 

But seppukoo.com has some way to go before it attracts anything near the more than 300 million users Facebook currently boasts. On Wednesday it pulled in only half a dozen Facebookers ready to end it all.

Its owners — whose website says are an “imaginary art-group from Italy” — told AFP by email that over 15,000 people had done the deed and over 350,000 Facebook users had received an invite to follow suit.

Facebook did not immediately reply when contacted by AFP to ask if it saw seppukoo.com as a threat and if it planned any action to block it.

To reinforce the tongue-in-cheek approach of seppukoo.com, the group’s art director — who uses the name Guy McMusker — replied when asked if he was a Facebook user: “Of course. We’re not Luddites. We’re incoherent.

The group is called “Linking The Invisible”‘ and its website says it is made up of media artists Clemente Pestelli and Gionatan Quintini whose work explores “the invisible links between the infosphere, neural synapsis, and real life.”

“Seppukoo admits that it is in reality a social networking group but seeks to distinguish itself from Facebook by noting that it will store no data and its server will not sell data to any third party.

“If you’ve trusted a merciless company (Facebook) until now, we hope you can also trust an imaginary artist group,” it says. McMusker said the site was not set up with a view to making money.

The RIP memorial page it offers Facebook dissidents could easily be mistaken for a real memorial for a real deceased person. But McMusker rejected suggestions it was in bad taste and said that no-one was likely to be upset.

“Just take it easy,” he wrote.

In the real world, suicide is obviously a one-way trip. But in the virtual world even a would-be subversive site like seppukoo.com cannot prevent your resurrection.

If you realise that leaving Facebook was a mistake, all you have to do is log back on again and your profile is instantly restored.

__________

Eventually, real life was too heavy of a burden for Cypher, and in the movie, The Matrix, he killed and sabotaged to find his way back to the land of make-believe.  His preference for the online world was no match for the truth of his situation.  For us, our online world is in a steady merge with reality.  But that is a reality that should all scare us.

For we become beholden to the machine, enslaved by the fake world of a light blue aura that shines into our eyes in the middle of the night, from a flat screen, or a handheld phone. 

So many people want genuine community, that the flat buzz of a monitor is too enticing, and offers community, though skewed as it is.  Because if people are devaluing real interaction, then all of our institutions which offer genuine community are headed for a change we may not want.

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It

December 1, 2009 at 8:59 pm (Uncategorized)
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I once had the chance to hear Bobby Bowden at a speaking engagement. 

I have not forgotten one of his absolute characteristics of a good football player. 

He told the audience that he always judged talent, not on statistics or size or reputation, but whether or not they had “it.” 

And he could not describe “it,” but he knew “it” when he saw “it.”  His wisdom was homespun, but matchless, because as I listened to him speak, I knew he had “it.”  ”It” was obvious when he told his audience that he always took his football team to church with him at the beginning of every season.  Only a coach with “it” would do such a thing. 

As a football fan, I will miss him.  Florida State University will miss him, too.  It is my impression that from this season forward, Florida State will become probably no more than a side story in college football, because the team will no longer have “it.” 

I read this story today, and though it was worth posting: 

“Bowden Delivered Big Wins, Laughs”
by Ivan Maisel
espn.com 

The stereotype of the successful Southern football coach once consisted of all hard edges and steely stares. He led through intimidation, measured his words, and treated football as the serious business that it is. He looked and sounded a lot like Gen. Robert Neyland to one generation, Bear Bryant to another. 

This is the world in which Bobby Bowden became a coach.  Bowden is none of those things.  He leads without intimidation and measures his words by the gross.  He treats football as a serious business but always saw a bigger picture.  He once wrote that his priorities in life are:  God, Family, Others, Football. 

And he won 388 games, more than twice as many as Neyland (173) and 65 more than Bryant (323). In his 34 years at Florida State, a tenure that comes to a painful end Tuesday, Bowden showed that he liked people almost as much as he liked winning. That’s saying something. 

Bowden could be hard if he needed to be. But he loved to sell. He sold himself and he sold Florida State football until the buyer couldn’t tell one from another. No better salesman ever existed. Bowden sold Seminoles football by playing anyone anywhere. When the Noles arrived at LSU or Nebraska or Ohio State, they gave as good as they got. 

Bowden would pull out a “barnyard” play, razzle the opponents with a little dazzle. He made it look as if playing at Florida State couldn’t be more fun. He developed a national reputation as a gunslinger, and his results bore out the team’s ability. He arrived at Florida State at the perfect time. 

When high school football in the state of Florida grew and evolved into the wellspring of talent that it is today, no school in the country could have been in better shape to take advantage. In 1987, the Seminoles began their streak of 14 consecutive seasons with a top-five finish. 

To illustrate how difficult that is, take a look at USC, which has plummeted into the middle of the Pac-10 this season. The Trojans, who have dominated football in this decade, broke their string of consecutive top-five seasons at seven. 

That’s exactly half of Florida State’s streak of top-five seasons. 

The emphasis on speed led to a shift from the power running game to the passing game. Bowden helped lead that change and took full advantage of it. As the Seminoles became a national power, the barnyard plays returned to the barnyard. Bowden didn’t need to create an advantage. Once he had the better players, he let them do their thing.With a highly competent staff led by defensive coordinator Mickey Andrews and offensive coordinator Mark Richt, Bowden had the time to be the face of Florida State football. 

 No one conducted a better news conference. He answered every question, no matter how ill-informed, no matter how unprepared, no matter how mundane. 

Writers knew that if Bowden repeated a question aloud, looking up as if in thought, that it meant that he wanted the writer to think he had just posed the most brilliant question uttered since Shakespeare.No one worked a room of alumni better. No one worked a church better. Bowden put his religion at the forefront of his life. But he did that without the hard sell, too. He always preferred the carrot to the stick.This next paragraph comes from a story I wrote in 2006, when Bowden went into the College Football Hall of Fame. The story appeared a couple of weeks after Bowden’s Seminoles went 6-6, his first non-winning regular season in 30 years:

In his book, “The Bowden Way: 50 Years of Leadership Wisdom,” written with his son Steve, Bobby Bowden wrote, “Sometimes the most unfair thing you do to a person is to allow him to continue his employment after the situation has become untenable.”

The first time he went 6-6, they came for his son Jeff, the offensive coordinator. The second time he went 6-6, they came for him.Something else Bowden said in that story is worth recalling.

Speaking on the day in which he would enter the College Football Hall of Fame, Bowden said, “Any time something bad happens to me, something good follows.”

That is the definition of a sunny disposition. As if winning 388 games while cracking jokes is not defining enough. 

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Africa

November 10, 2009 at 7:26 pm (Uncategorized)
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Take a moment and listen to the Perpetuum Jazille choir perform “Africa,” in October, 2008. 

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Linger

November 5, 2009 at 7:28 pm (Blogging)
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The earliest photo taken of the White House

The White House, photographed for the first time in 1846 by John Plumbe during the Polk administration.

It seems to me, that if any place in America would be haunted, it would most certainly be the White House, with all of the tension and stress and decisions made within those walls. 

There must be some sort of supernatural residue still lingering there.  A former resident certainly believes it to be so.

Fright House: Jenna Bush on the ghostly music playing in the presidential home already ‘haunted’ by Abraham Lincoln
by Sara Nelson
for the Daily Mail

The daughter of former President George W Bush has claimed she saw ghosts during her time in the White House.

Jenna Bush Hager told chat show host Jay Leno she had been terrified by spooky events near the fireplace in her bedroom.

The 27-year-old teacher, who now works as an education correspondent for the Today Show said: ‘I heard a ghost. I was asleep, there was a fireplace in my room and all of a sudden I heard 1920s music coming out. 

‘I could feel it, I freaked out and ran into my sister’s room. She was like “Please go back to sleep this is ridiculous”.

‘The next week we were both asleep in my room, the phone had rang and woke us up.

‘We were talking and going back to bed when all of a sudden we heard this opera, coming out of the fireplace.

‘We couldn’t believe it, we both jumped in bed and were asking the people that worked there the next morning “Are we crazy?”

‘We tried to rationalise it, but they said they heard it there all the time.’

Jenna and her family lived at the Washington DC presidential home from 2001 to 2009.

She told how her parents were settling in well back at home in Texas, and that the former president has even been offered a job at a hardware store – but turned it down, feeling he was overqualified.

The former first daughter confessed she had never seen Abraham Lincoln’s ghost – which is said to regularly haunt the White House – but wished she had.

Lincoln’s ghost is widely reported to walk up and down the second floor hallway, knock at doors and stand at certain windows with his hands clasped behind his back.

Indeed Winston Churchill refused to sleep in the former president’s bedroom after reportedly spotting his ghost lurking there.

The British Prime Minister had stepped into the room after a relaxing bath with a cigar and a glass of scotch.

Still naked, the premier is reported to have spied an apparition of Lincoln standing by the fireplace. The pair are said to have started at each other for some time before the ghost faded away.

Former first lady Hilary Clinton has also spoken about the spooky atmosphere in the White House.

The US Secretary of State said: ‘There is something about the house at night that you just feel like you are summoning up the spirits of all the people who have lived there and worked there and walked through the halls there.’

She told the Rosie O’Donnell Show: ‘It’s neat, it can be a little creepy.

‘You know, they think there’s a ghost there. It is a big old house and when the lights are out it is dark and quiet and any movement at all catches your attention.’

Indeed Harry Truman once wrote to his wife: ‘I sit here in this old house, all the while listening to the ghosts walk up and down the hallway.

‘At 4 o’clock I was awakened by three distinct knocks on my bedroom door. No one there.  [The] place is haunted, sure as shootin’!’

As well as human hauntings, the have been tales of a demon cat prowling the building’s basement.

According to legend, years go by without a sighting of the animal, but when it does appear, national disaster is said to be imminent.

Some witnesses claim the demon cat first appears as a helpless-looking kitten, which grows in size and menace the closer one gets to it.

A White House guard claimed to have seen it a week before the great stock market crash of the 1920s and it was also reportedly seen days before the assassination of JFK.

I’m not sure if Lincoln’s ghost is more frightening, though, than the thought of Churchill fresh from a bath.

Anyway, ghosts are most definitely real.  And while they may not be the unattached spirits or souls of the dead, they are real in the sense that after any great tragedy, or crisis, we allow some sort of residual effect to linger.

A fight.  A death.  Turmoil.  Job loss.  Rebellious kids.  Conversations with harsh words.  Wrecking decisions.   All of these give us remorse, guilt, and we are haunted with the sheer regret of the crisis.  And that residue, sometimes, just won’t leave.

May we have better discernment about the words we say and the actions we choose, or, maybe more importantly, about the words we keep, and the actions we disregard.

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Remember

November 3, 2009 at 4:37 pm (Art)
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I often think about the Eucharist.  I am amazed at how little, in the New Testament, it is mentioned.  Most often, it is called, simply, “breaking bread,” and seems to imply that the Eucharist of the early church may have been a memorial meal, shared by all of the saints, which offered a chance of fellowship and memory, possibly not unlike our own Thanksgiving meals.

We have moved it to something very somber, though.  Most faiths tend to have it as a part of the design of worship, with specific prayers.  Some faiths, even, have the Eucharist offered by a leader in the church.  And, like most human things, it has its varying degrees of executions, but always with some sort of quiet meditation.

And that is not wrong, or offensive.  I shared a conversation with a member of my church, just last week, who said he has grown tired of an image of a crucifed Christ displayed during the communion moments.  Instead, he wanted a picture of an empty tomb, because, he said, “that’s what all of this is about, anyway.”

I believe our exercising of the Eucharist would be found insulting by those in the earliest models of the Christian church.  What seems to be a celebratory meal of fellowship has been turned into just another moment in the design of a worship event.  Long gone are the loaves of bread, broken together, with large pieces eaten and chased by overflowing cups of wine.   Instead, there are small wafers, and a slight sip, all with the idea to remember the remarkable moment in the Christian faith.

Maybe these ideas are foreign to you.  Perhaps you worship in a church where the Eucharist is only observed during special days, or occassions, or maybe you worship in a church where communion is shared every Sunday.  Either way, it deserves a second look.

Which brings me to the following story.  It is a slight story about the Berlin Wall, but I think it says volumes about the human desire to simply remember, both the awful, and the celebrations which follow.

Twenty Years After, Berlin Wall Gets a Facelift
by Kristen Grieshaber, for the Associated Press

Stroke by stroke, Gerhard Kriedner applied pink acrylic paint with a small brush on a 14-yard stretch of the Berlin Wall, recreating the mural he first painted months after the Berlin Wall came down on Nov. 9, 1989.

Kriedner and 90 artists from around the world have gathered again to repaint their original creations on the concrete slabs, bringing new life to images that have been eroded by the elements over the last two decades, on the longest remaining length of the wall that once split Germany’s capital.

“This is a very emotional thing for me,” Kriedner, 69, said, adding that he escaped from communist East Germany to the West himself as a young man. “The Berlin Wall stands for the total lack of freedom we had at the time.”

While Berliners were initially eager to tear down the city’s most detested symbol, in recent months there has been a major effort to restore the 3/4 mile-long (1.3-kilometer) dilapidated East Side Gallery — a major tourist attraction with 106 different paintings and graffiti.

“The wall was rotten through and through,” Kriedner said on a recent chilly, overcast autumn day as he put the finishing touches on his mural — a dark, barren landscape with bursting soap bubbles colored pink and light blue, his interpretation of the promise of Socialist dreams colliding with reality.

“In order to restore the wall, the entire artwork was scraped off, the concrete was chiseled down to the steel insides, and then everything had to be reapplied, but this time with waterproof acrylic paints,” the Bavarian artist said, adding that he’d been working off a photo of his original piece to ensure the new version mimicked the original.

Kani Alavi, the head of the East Side Gallery’s Artists’ Association, has been the driving force behind the restoration work that started in October 2008. Alavi lobbied for years to collect the euro2.5 million ($3.7 million) from the city, state and federal governments needed for the restoration process. That included room and board for the artists, who otherwise worked for free.

Of the initial group of artists, only five declined to participate in the renovation project. Six others died and their murals have been restored by other artists.

“We thought it was really important to recreate the paintings because, by now, there’s a whole new generation that no longer remembers the original Berlin Wall and the historic events that led to Germany’s reunification,” said Alavi, an Iranian-born artist who had already restored his own mural of East Germans crossing Checkpoint Charlie into West Berlin on the night the border opened for the first time.

Every day, the East Side Gallery in Berlin’s formerly eastern Friedrichshain neighborhood attracts thousands of tourists who pose for snapshots in front of the murals.

The western side of the wall was covered in graffiti during the decades after the barrier was erected on Aug. 13, 1961. The eastern side stood barren, desolate and guarded by stern border police for decades. Only after the wall’s collapse did a group of Berlin artists decide to decorate the stretch — the first joint art project of the formerly divided city.

They called on artists from around the world to join them in expressing their feelings in paint and color on the formerly untouchable east side of the wall.

“We had nothing, only cheap paint and brushes, but we were so euphoric about all the historic changes and we wanted to express them in our paintings,” Alavi said, adding that the murals show the joy and hopefulness of overcoming injustice that people believed was possible at the time.

Since then, pollution, weather and time turned famous images like the fraternal communist kiss between East German leader Erich Honecker and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, or the East German Trabant car that appears to be bursting through the wall, into a sad sight — with long cracks in the concrete and big chunks of paint flaking off.

Then there were the souvenir-seekers who chipped off pieces of rock or scrawled their names and messages atop the paintings.

The East Side Gallery received historic monument status in 1991. But despite new signs asking visitors not to tamper with the bright new paintings, it’s uncertain whether the new art will be free from graffiti, vandalism or souvenir hunters.

Some, however, didn’t seem to mind that prospect.

Julie Zinser, a tourist from Riverside, California who was strolling down along the wall said she loved the paintings, but the bright new colors made the it look less authentic.

“It seems like the gritty beauty of this city got a little lost,” Zinser said and then posed for a photo with her two daughters.

The Berlin Wall

The Berlin Wall

What is a memory worth, anyway?  To these artists, it is a teaching moment, a moment when the world will once again understand the oppressive effects of a dividing wall broken against a surge of freedom.  Old artists now want to use it as a canvas, to teach this generation of such a powerful moment, for those in Germany, and even in the world.

We have a need to remember.  We glance through old photographs, share stories around weekend dinners, watch black and white films, all because we really do like to remember those moments.

The Eucharist is a common memory, then, a chance to again find great peace and celebration in an act of deliverance.  But what is this memory worth to you?

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