Welcome to the Pigeonhole

One of the things we humans love to do in varying degrees is label things – especially each other. If your skin is a certain color, it’s assumed that you behave or think a certain way. The same goes for where you live or come from. We've been eagerly pigeonholing since ancient times.

I often joke with friends about astrology, and one reminded me this week that it’s not scientific. I was born near the end of August, and top astrologers can’t agree whether I am a Leo or a Virgo. That makes me a bicuspid, I guess, LOL. But it assumes I have certain personal characteristics. The interesting part is that the sun actually appears to cross more constellations in the universe than astrology gives it credit for, like Cetus the Whale. Including Cetus would really bollox up the works, and all those professional astrologers who have us neatly classified might be out of jobs.

At one time, I did a radio talk show. Of all the heavy and controversial subjects we dealt with, no guest generated more calls than the numerologist, who could tell people what their characteristics were just by knowing their birth date, from which she derived the numbers that influenced their lives. My primary number is 5, she said. I have forgotten what that means.

The Elizabethans had “humors.” You were either sanguine, coleric, melancholic, or phlegmatic, and through such classifications they could tell you what bodily organ governed you, and even why you were healthy or unhealthy, as well as your general temperament.

We have more modern systems, but I wonder how different they really are. An especially popular one is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), developed by a mother-daughter team of psychologists during World War II, mainly to determine what kinds of jobs would be most comfortable for all the women entering the workforce while men were away fighting the war. It was derived from the work of Carl Jung, and it is still in use in the shrink world. One I consulted some years back desperately wanted me to be an INFP, but I took the test a bunch of times, and it became fairly clear I was an ISTJ, although a good friend who knows about these things calls me an INTJ, which I took as kind of a compliment. I’m not going to explain all this -- it would take too long.

Another friend once invited me to lunch at a fancy restaurant. A few minutes into the meal, he shoved a clipboard at me with a multiple-choice MBTI test on it, which I dutifully filled out. He told me he was doing this to all of his friends.

This next comes under the heading of “things I should have said when I had the chance but didn’t think of until later.” I would have said, “Fred, don’t you think it would be nice to simply experience another human being without filtering the encounter through some artificial matrix to give yourself the illusion of control over it?” But I’m glad I didn’t say that. He was, after all, paying for lunch.

I think I have learned, sometimes the hard way,  that human relations are a lot messier than we’d like them to be – and that maybe they’d be deeper and more satisfying if we learned to put up with a little mess now and then, and leave the classifications on the shelf.

Sea Changes

Let me see…we were about to launch an attack on Syria, but now we’re talking to the Russians about their plan to secure and destroy Syria’s stockpile of chemical weapons. And now the new president of Iran, Hassan Rouhani, has ended the denial of the Holocaust and wants to negotiate over that country’s plans to become a nuclear power. What’s going on here? What triggered this? It’s not spring. But could it be an equinoctial thing?

Probably nothing so semi-metaphysical. I think it’s more about enlightened self-interest. The Russians have substantial military and economic interest in what happens in Syria. Putin & Co. would probably like to see the Assad regime stay in power for as long as possible. In Iran, maybe reality is setting in. CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, who interviewed Rouhani, says he wouldn’t be making nice unless he had authorization to do so from the religious leaders of his country, and why would they provide it? Could it be that economic sanctions are actually hurting, and the old men who run that country realize that the general population, which is much younger and less hateful of America, might be upset with them if they don’t change their attitudes? Is it a case of  “the devil knowing his time is short”?

Some Americans may have trouble trusting either the Russians or the Iranians, after our past history with their respective governments. But there are few more solid foundations for trust than an opposing party doing something that’s good, simply because circumstances are leaving no other choice.

So the next question is, if our worst enemies are finally doing something we want them to do because they have to do it, can the same principles work with forcing Congress to work through differences on Obamacare and the debt ceiling?

I think locking members of Congress in the Capitol and locking all the bathrooms there until they get this done would work just fine. There are few more powerful incentives than having to go because you have to go.

Habemus Papam

"...If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist,  if he wants everything clear and safe, he will find nothing...Those who always look for disciplinarian solutiions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal 'security,' those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists -- they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies."

It has bgeen crystal clear for years that the Catholic Church has needed an overhaul. Perhaps it will begin with the sea change that has occurred at the very top. The words above are from an interview given to a Jesuit journal by Pope Francis I -- a welcome breeze through the musty catacombs of an institution that needs it.

I am no longer Catholic, but I was raised that way in a time when things were different.The Mass was in Latin. Fridays, and quite a few other days, were meatless -- I had one of those calendars with the fish icons signifying when meat was off-limits. I kept close track of my sins, so much so that I was afraid to fly unless I had been to confession, in case the plane should crash and I should die with a blot on my soul and be sent to the place with eternal central heating. It was a scary time to be a child, much less an adolescent. The church has since lightened up, to a point.

There's something about religions. They start out with a simple mission and then turn into corporations with a hierarchy and sets of rules, regulations, and judgments -- often combined with the conviction that the world won't be quite right unless everyone is converted. Judaism had turned into one of these when Jesus came along. If he had a mission, it was to bring religion back to its original purpose. Would he approve of what has been done in his name since he left? For that matter, would the Prophet Muhammad (blessings and peace be upon him) be happy with what's happened to Islam? I think we know the answers.

I am becoming less "religious" as I age, when I've always been told it should be the other way around. My problem with most religions is that they consider being human some kind of inferior status. When we screw up, we're told we're "only human." The phrase "human nature" usually refers to something negative. I often wonder what would become of art, music, and literature in a world where humanity is continually discounted. Would we all be singing hymns instead of love songs?

A worthy goal of religion would seem to be to put us into alignment with our "better angels." But it also has to let us breathe. I may be reading too much into the new pope's words, but I think this is one of the things he's trying to tell us. It will be enlightening to hear what else he has to say.

Russian Roulette

Let’s be clear about one thing. Russia doesn’t do anybody any favors. But sometimes, self-interest is the best motivator. By proposing a plan under which the chemical weapons Syria now has would be secured and destroyed under the auspices of the U.N., the Russians have persuaded President Obama to take his finger off the trigger for the time being. Hey, and didn’t the Syrian regime admit that it has chemical weapons? All-in-all, not as bad a day as it seems.

Syria – and in particular, the Assad regime — are very important to Moscow. Russia has a huge naval base in Syria. Under an unfriendly post-Assad government, they could lose it. Second, if the chemical weapons possessed by Syria fall into unfriendly hands, they could be used by Islamic activists in Russian republics. Finally, Syria is the tail and Russia is the dog. Assad will do what Moscow tells him to do.

All of this points to the chemical weapons being secured, or at least not used, which is sort of what we’re after, correct?

The only problem is, we have to listen to a useless debate in the U.N. about all this. We often hear it said that the United States is not the policeman of the world. That would be a great principle if the world had a police department – which theoretically is the U.N. We can see how well that’s working for us.

I wish the Obama administration would stop saying we will have no boots on the ground in Syria. The fact is, the boots are already there. They’re being worn by CIA operatives advising the rebels; can overt military advisors be far behind?

I also wish the President would stop talking about children, and asking us to watch the videos of children suffering and dying from Sarin gas poisoning. Like none of the 100,000-plus previous Syrian fatalities were children, and like they didn’t die equally horrible deaths. The current “crisis” is a concocted one, laid on top of the real one that’s been going on for more than two years, around which the world has danced.

But put me down for this: If Assad takes advantage of this muddled period to use chemical weapons again, I’d be very pleased if we re-aimed our missiles and blew him to the next dimension.

Just Do It

Relax! I’m not talking about attacking Syria or trying to sell you athletic equipment. This is about courage – not the kind that helps you rescue trapped people from burning buildings, but the everyday kind you need to function in life.

Example: In spite of many years experience as a broadcaster, I am not an expert in doing my own audio mixing with software. The job I’m contracted to do called for a very minor mixing operation, but I had been afraid to perform it with this software. Thanks to the Internet, I discovered that this was a wheel I did not have to re-invent – others had done it, and showed me how. So I did it, and experienced tremendous elation when the simple task was accomplished.

It’s like the time I first learned to replace light switches. There was no opportunity to call an electrician, so I figured it out myself by opening up the wall housing (with the power off!), looking at how it was wired, and using the same wiring on a new switch. Presto! I flipped the switch on an off a hundred times just to watch it work, and wanted to replace every other switch in the house immediately, but resisted it, choosing instead to wait until something was actually broken before I fixed it.

Depending on the complexity of the task, of course, you need more courage if you have to do it yourself. A good friend had to move to another state on the other side of the country with her three cats. Shipping them or finding hotels that would accommodate the “family” was out of the question. My friend decided on traveling by RV, which involved not only buying one, but learning how to drive this large vehicle and hook it up to utilities at RV parks. In the process, she successfully made the cross-country trip by herself, visited more than a dozen new states, and had a built-in inexpensive place to stay in her destination city while she spent weeks looking for the perfect house to buy. Brilliant solution, brought about by necessity.

Similarly, another friend was deathly afraid of flying some years ago, but a new job required her to make numerous business trips. She doesn’t really enjoy the trips these days (they’re work), but she has lost her fear of flying, and has amassed hundreds of thousands of frequent-flier miles to use on international travel at some point.

My wife found public speaking very daunting (unlike me!), but obtained a contract job which required her to do a lot of it. Like my frequent-flier friend, it’s still not her favorite thing, but she no longer loses a night’s sleep before she has to be “on stage.”

It’s a simple fact that since almost all of us put our pants on one leg at a time, we can learn to do what we need to do. When we admire people who have overcome small – or large -- personal hurdles, we should take a minute to realize that it can happen for us, too – we just have to do it.

Bark or Bite

The good news is, American missiles won’t be flying toward Syria today. The bad news is, we just kissed most of the credibility we had in the bank goodbye with President Obama’s decision to seek approval from Congress for a strike on Syria -- after all the run-up that has already taken place. If Congress says no to an attack, President Obama will have little choice but to follow British Prime Minister David Cameron’s lead and stand the military down.

Does that mean we will have given Mr. Assad the green light to continue to use chemical weapons? We have green-lighted innumerable atrocities up to this point, so we might well wonder what’s different now.

Personally, I feel the time for messaging has long since passed. If Mr. Assad personally gave the orders to use chemical weapons, as we have charged, he is already a war criminal of the first order, right up there with Hitler and Pol Pot. If he sees a green light here and resumes the use of such weapons, that should be a green light for us to send a lot more than a message. We will have no reasonable choice – if we want our credibility back -- but to take out Assad – or arrest him and put him on trial. Will that be Iraq II? Can we remove Assad from power, face down Iran and Russia, and let the remaining Syrian factions determine their own fate (which means fighting it out)?

We cannot effect real change, unfortunately, without getting our hands dirty – and if we’re not prepared to do that, we should indeed stay out of Syria and take our credibility lumps. The last war we can take credit for winning (and not solo credit) ended almost 70 years ago. We’ve been tinkering around with war since then, at a great cost to the lives of our young men, and these days, women.

A Syrian woman interviewed on the radio this morning quoted a proverb to the effect that the louder and longer a dog barks, the less it’s apt to bite. We need to stop barking and bite something, or else put the muzzle on and go back to bed.

Hearing the Dinner Bell

For the better part of two years, the Obama administration has told us that all options are on the table to deal with the crisis in Syria. The table is set, and dinner is about to be served.

On Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry’s words of warning were clear: there was no question that chemical weapons had been used on civilians – a moral obscenity, and the clear crossing of the so called red line had occurred.  It wasn’t all that long ago that another Secretary of State, Colin Powell, displayed graphic evidence, or so we were given to believe, of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Ah, but this is different, right? Syria really does have chemical weapons. And apparently, the regime no longer has compunctions about using them. But as for moral outrage about this, do you think it might be possible that at least one of the 100-thousand-plus civilians who died by what we might call conventional means may have suffered equally horrible or even more agonizing deaths than the current nerve gas victims? The red line was drawn in a strange place.

What we have been learning the hard way about the Middle East is that dictatorships have served as artificial lids on boiling pots. Military action on our part won’t turn down the heat in Syria.

Is the red line really about U.S. credibility? In the case of Syria, we lost it two years ago. So is firing off a few missiles really going to send the message to Iran and/or Russia that we’re not to be trifled with? They’ve been trifling with us a long time. What is different about this moment?

To my mind, there is only one justification for military action: obtaining control of the chemical weapons or destroying them so that the Assad regime can’t use them on civilians anymore and so that they don’t fall into the wrong hands. Unless military force attains those goals, it’s a waste of time and resources. Our attention might better be paid to the plight of the hundreds of thousands of Syrians displaced by this conflict, many living in desperate situations in countries that can’t handle them.

If we really have to sit down to dinner, it might be a good time for someone to say grace – and pray hard before we pick up the knife and fork.

Thankless Jobs

These jobs I would never do. I don’t care how much I was paid. Am I talking about cleaning sewers or working in a mortuary? Nope

OK, well I probably wouldn’t do those either, but today I’m talking about customer service work – being on the other end of a phone line with someone who has a problem with a product.

The thing that amazes me is how cheerful and cooperative most of these folks are. Their jobs largely consist of saying the same thing over and over to a succession of callers, some of whom are angry. It’s not the customer service person’s fault that something was wrong with the product or it wasn’t delivered, but these are the individuals who have to absorb customer frustration, belligerence – and even threats.

True, you sometimes get connected to one of these folks who are trained to dodge your questions or not listen to you. But that’s because the company they work for has trained them to deliver that message. I’ll bet relatively few of them enjoy it.

Just because I hate doing this dance, if it seems like it’s welcome, I try to chat up these folks a little bit. Maybe I’ve been to the city or town where their call center is. Often, they have unusual names, especially the women. I talked to one this morning, for instance, whose name was Timber. No, she told me, neither of her parents worked for the Forest Service – it was just the only name they could agree on when she was born.

Yes, I even try talking to the people in India – but to Western ears, they all have unusual names, which they often ditch in favor of something American-sounding.

Look, these folks go to work every day – even on the days when they have serious problems of their own and don’t feel like being nice to anybody -- but they somehow manage to do it. This is true not only of call center people, but of anybody who has to wait on others. If I were a waiter in an Italian restaurant, the first customer who gave me a problem would have a lap full of clam sauce, and I probably wouldn’t bother to close the door on my way out.

So if your job involves serving others, and you can do it well and be consistent about it, you have this writer’s deep sympathy and undying admiration.

Send Out the Clowns

 The flap over the now infamous Missouri State Fair rodeo clown’s spoof of President Obama is not just a simple tempest in a teapot.  It only adds to my wonderment at the nature of humor. For years, I have asked myself why some who make one quip perceived as racist have to quit their jobs, weep and gnash their teeth in eternal banishment while others get away with it, even make a way-more-than-comfortable living at it.

For decades, Don Rickles packed auditoriums in Vegas. Bill Maher would seem to be his logical successor, with shtick full of comments about blacks, Asians and others that are clearly racist -- but most of us laugh anyway. On the female side, there are Joan Rivers and perhaps her successor, Sarah Silverman, whose main goal seems to be to shock us.

Many comedians work “dirty” these days, with shtick full of f-words. Personally, I think Robin Williams is a stitch without the injection of such language, but he does it in concerts. Maybe that’s just me. When I was young I laughed very hard at Red Skelton, from whose lips a dirty word never issued on stage or screen.

In one of those famous Woody Allen movies whose titles all run together in my head, Alan Alda, playing a TV star, is seen telling a group of up-and-comers, “If it bends, it’s funny; if it breaks, it’s not funny!” Sometimes it’s about the material. The joke just doesn’t work. Or the comedian can’t make it work.

Is it about conscious – or even unconscious – intention? The Missouri rodeo clown could have been just plain mean. But were those who made fun of Bush 43, Reagan, Nixon, Clinton or Carter any less mean? Does Obama “deserve” it any less than they? I return to Bill Maher, who makes jokes about Obama’s race on practically every show.

Maybe it’s about the comedian internally laughing along with us, bringing to the surface attitudes many of feel we have to suppress or are afraid to recognize in ourselves. Prejudices, if you look at them from a distance, are actually fuuny, largely because they make no sense. But there’s a chord that has to resonate someplace in us to bring out the laugh.

As you can see, I haven’t begun to figure this out, but I’m not sure the myriad of minds out there better than my own have figured it out either. Don’t even think about applying concepts like fairness or consistency to this problem. You will fail miserably, as I have.

Real Journalists

California Senator Dianne Feinstein may have put her foot in it up to the ankle as she introduced a bill that would shield journalists from criminal investigations related to their work. She made it clear that her measure was intended to protect real reporters, defined as those who draw a salary -- as opposed, I guess, to screwball bloggers with 10 or so faithful readers....er...like me.

There are lots of people out there who would love to be “real” reporters and be paid a decent salary, though such positions are fewer and farther between, as traditional news organizations that could actually pay salaries have drastically shrunk.

But I do know what DiFi is trying to say. Now that journalism has been democratized, anyone can have a platform, like the one I’m standing on right now. Journalism is one of those professions that many people think they can do without the least bit of training. They have eyes, ears, noses, and may be plugged farther in than the lame-stream media people in the big building down the street.

I used to work in a tourist town. Tourism involves promotion and marketing, and it seemed that at every public meeting, somebody would stand up and offer some whizbang magic bullet that would double the number of visitors to town overnight, and wondered why those in the business didn’t have the brains to see a solution that was right in front of them. It didn’t matter that the head of the convention and visitors bureau in the city had a degree or two in this subject, or that those running hotels actually had gone to a university to study their industry, and might even have a decade or three of experience in it.

Many parents are experts on how to educate children, and wonder why their kids’ credentialed teachers can’t do it and why they pay taxes to support overly compensated school district administrators, some of whom have doctoral degrees. Or your great aunt has a family recipe that has healed what’s ailing you a lot faster than the Harvard-educated doc with all those expensive pills.

But isn’t there something to be said for journalists whose passions have prodded them to get the training and put in the time practicing their craft, who’ve been around the block a few times, know when they’re being flim-flammed and where the bodies are buried, and have learned how to tell you the stories you need to see, hear, or read? They probably wouldn’t be in that profession over a period long enough to have acquired those skills unless someone paid them along the way.

So Senator, I hear what you’re saying. But maybe there’s a better way of saying it.

Wake-Up Calls

So I’m minding my own business, getting ready for bed, when the smartphone makes the most God-awful sound I’ve ever heard. It’s an alert tone, and the phone vibrates, too. I thought, earthquake? Tsunami? Al Qaeda? No, it was an Amber Alert, coming from a town more than 500 miles away, about a suspected child kidnapping.

Now I am all in favor, of course, of rescuing children and bringing kidnappers to justice. But do I want to be jolted into a heart condition by what amounts to a “be on the lookout” advisory? Such warnings should be limited to threats that could affect my or my neighbors; or community’s immediate safety, IMHO.

Fortunately, I can turn the Amber Alerts off on my phone (not that easy a task!). I also learned that there are several gradations of alerts – vaguely reminiscent of the Bush administration’s infamous color-coding system to warn us of a terrorist attack. I believe many institutions, and even a country or two, still use this kind of scheme. They also seem to agree that red is a bad thing – no political statement intended.

But the smart phone’s gradations include "Severe" alert. The next highest one up is "Extreme" alert, though I can’t for the life of me decide what the heck’s the difference between those two. Then there’s the "Presidential" alert. That one is apparently mandatory – the phone won’t allow me to turn it off.  I guess if we get one of those, we’re in really deep doo-doo.

My phone is special. It can display a little icon of seven guys in white robes with wings, all blowing trumpets. That really is Game Over. I wonder what that’s going to sound like. Trumpets, probably. But I’m sure when that event comes along, I won’t need the smartphone to play that sound – it will come from another source. Guess it will be OK to set the phone to “vibrate.”

Be a Hero, Pay a Price

A military judge has found Army Pvt. Bradley Manning guilty of more than 20 counts against him, including espionage, for his role in supplying information for the notorious WikiLeaks release of hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents, including State Department cables. Manning walked on the count of “aiding the enemy” – appropriate, in my view, as I don’t think that was his intention, even though some of the material could actually put foreign interests working with the United States in danger. Manning’s stated intention was to encourage debate, and that he did, but it could cost him decades in prison.

Pardon me, but I’m still trying to figure out, besides sparking debate, exactly what this release accomplished. Manning had to violate an oath, steal information, and make public cables for which the senders had a reasonable expectation of privacy. While Manning  likely heads for prison, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, perhaps a step up in accommodations, but probably not much higher.

Meanwhile, Edward Snowden remains stuck in the Moscow airport transit section following his revelation of the NSA scheme to collect data on Americans, whether or not they are suspected of crimes. Snowden also violated an oath, but felt we all needed to know about this program and start talking about it. It worked! But Snowden may find himself living in less-than-savory countries from now on, always looking over his shoulder.

Some -- though I’m not one of them -- may consider all three of these guys heroes and may wonder why they have to pay for brave acts in furtherance of the noble cause of light-shedding. Bravery (or bravado) was certainly involved, but how noble were the causes? It may truly be up to history to decide that question. I do think it’s fair to say that all three deserve what’s coming to them, at least in the short term.

A hero always has to pay a price – or risk paying one. It comes with the territory.

Thanks, Mr. Weiner

We should be grateful for the Anthony Weiners of this world. They give us something to talk about. Comedians should actually be sending him royalties. Are we having fun yet?

Then there are those of us who are shocked, shaking our heads. Disgusting! How can this be? How can this slug have the audacity to present himself for public office? Here’s where we get to feel just a little superior. We’d never do anything like what he did.

Look -- of course he should know better than to seriously present himself for office with that kind of an admission.  But can’t we take a minute to feel sad for the waste of an otherwise talented individual who has been and might again have been an effective legislator, were it not for his little problem? This would be especially true if you’re a Democrat.

Remember that this isn’t the first public official to be in this kind of boat, though maybe this is the 21^st century version of it. We allow sexual peccadilloes up to a point, but we are not a forgiving lot when it comes to this stuff, especially if it goes over the kink line.

Here’s the really hard one: Can we take another minute to say to ourselves, “There, but for the grace of God (or whatever force you choose) go I?” And be grateful, for just one nanosecond, that we are not subject to Anthony Weiner’s particular brand of compulsion?

Or at least be grateful that whatever compulsion we are subject to, it’s a socially acceptable one?

Just wondering…

Fear of the Other

President Obama startled the unsuspecting White House press corps, and much of the country, with his unscripted remarks about race on Friday. Following the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Florida, the President may have been feeling the pressure from the civil rights community to say something, and he delivered. But he made it clear that it really wasn’t about the verdict in the case. It was about profiling, saying that Trayvon Martin could easily have been he 35 years earlier.

That tragic incident in Florida was not about the state’s Stand Your Ground law. It was about much broader and deeper issues, starting with America’s love affair with guns, but even that’s too narrow a focus. It’s about the primal human fear of The Other.

I heard an NPR commentator – a white woman – say this morning that while she prided herself on her progressive views and her support of racial equality, the city she lives in, Washington D.C., is predominantly African-American, and that she was surprised to discover some lingering racial attitudes in her own heart.

As most of us know, prejudice is pre-judging – coming to a conclusion before all the facts are in. We do this all the time, about many things besides race, perhaps most often to ourselves. We say things like, “I’m no good at math,” and we do everything we can to avoid working with numbers, perhaps because of bad experiences with them in school. But then the day comes when our accountant is vacationing in Maui, and we have financial decisions to make on a deadline. We have to sit down at the kitchen table and figure it out. And we discover we’re not as bad at math as we thought. Numbers don’t scare us anymore, because we had no choice but to work with them.

What exactly does the expression, “Some of my best friends are Jews” mean, as an example? It doesn’t mean, “I like you in spite of the fact that you’re a Jew.” It means, “You’re my friend first, and your Jewishness is secondary” – or perhaps not an issue at all. What happens when people of different races fall in love and get married -- once a crime in many states? It means they love each other as complete human beings. It's why Mr. Obama is on this planet.

As an aside, I’ve often said that the quickest way to learn a foreign language is to fall in love with someone who doesn’t speak yours. Trust me, it leaves Rosetta Stone in the dust.

The trouble with prejudice is that there’s security in it. Everything and everybody are in their assigned places, fulfilling the roles expected of them. It’s all “sorted,” as the British like to say, so we don’t have to think about it. It goes even beyond the fear of The Other. It’s the fear of Chaos.

Some of us have a deeply ingrained resistance to having our world rocked. But the days of that kind of stability are over. Our world is being rocked almost daily now, and our preconceived notions are falling like dominoes in all kinds of fields. Perhaps that’s a good thing. Is the time coming when we will actually welcome such changes instead of fighting them?  And celebrate differences instead of fearing them?

I should live so long.

Hardly a Surprise

I had a strong feeling that George Zimmerman was going to walk, though I was reluctant to voice it ahead of time.

Was justice done for him and Trayvon Martin? Justice is one of those lovely abstractions we like to hang things on, but when reduced to the human level, justice is a very subjective thing. By itself, our court system doesn’t represent justice. It’s just the vehicle that’s supposed to get us there. The last stage in the process is the trial. As with any adversary situation, much like a sporting event, the better team wins. A clear majority of the legal talking heads on cable TV seemed to conclude that the defense did a much better job of presenting its case than the prosecution did.

Much of the trial was televised as per Florida law, raising the perennial issue of whether cameras in the courtroom are harmful. This may go against the grain, but I have persistently believed that if a single seat in a courtroom is open to a member of the general public, by extension, the rest of us should be able to see the same proceeding, with adequate protections, of course, for the jurors.

While the usual concerns about media hype and the folks in court playing to the cameras are raised, I submit that it’s beneficial for the public to know exactly how our courts work and how our laws are applied. There are cameras on almost every street corner, and while we may not all like the idea, we’re used to them by now. If there were cameras in every courtroom in procedures that are open to the public, we would eventually get used to that concept, and be better educated as well. There would be fewer “trials of the century,” because they’d all be on TV.

To return to the point, though, was justice done in Florida? One Facebook friend commented on a post of mine last night, telling us all to relax, it’s Florida, as if real justice isn’t expected there. If we expect all trials to produce justice, are we expecting too much?

I won’t dodge your lingering question. As I’ve said before, I think this country would be a considerably safer place if we didn’t have Neighborhood Watchers walking around with guns.

Disaster and Humility

This morning I read a rather surprising story about a surviving passenger aboard the plane that crashed at San Francisco International Airport on Saturday. This individual, an executive at Samsung, began tweeting out information to the world almost immediately after the crash. Naturally, the cable news networks wanted to talk to him, but he said no, on the grounds that he didn’t want to divert attention from the crash and was just tweeting to let the world know that most of the passengers were OK.

He said NO? Is he a candidate for sainthood or just shy?

When I was a journalist, I was a little different. Some years ago, my town was rattled by a rather strong earthquake, which lasted what seemed like an eternity. Before the shaking stopped, I was on the phone to a national radio network. My wife observed that I hit that phone first before even asking how she was. She doesn’t hold it against me, saying I was just acting like a good reporter.

Cut to last year, where I was in the lead car of a metro train in the city where I live now. The train struck someone who was on the tracks. He had lain there deliberately, apparently. The train stopped, and I heard the engineer calling plaintively under the train, “Sir, are you OK?” Did I worry about how other passengers were reacting? I had no recorder with me, and probably would have used it to gather their reactions for news use. Instead, I was on the phone to the local news radio station immediately.

Should I be ashamed of this cold-fish behavior? I can’t say that I am, even though the Samsung guy at least started me thinking about it. Isn’t one of the chief motivations of the average professional journalist – or media outlet – to be there first with the information? Doesn’t part of the thrill come from knowing you are first, and if even for a few seconds, in complete control of the story?

Those of you who think this is a questionable motivation are no doubt thrilled to know that in this interconnected world, the media don’t control stories anymore. The people do. Humility is being forced on media folks, whether we like it or not. Professional reporters aren’t usually the first at the scene of breaking news. Information has been democratized. Media outlets depend on “civilians,” who carry all the necessary newsgathering equipment in their pockets. And the civilians are in control. If you don’t want to talk to CNN, as that Samsung guy didn’t, you don’t have to.

It’s clear to me, though, that I will not be joining him as he ascends into heaven. I am packing a Hawaiian shirt for the other place.

 

Casting Stones

Southern chef Paula Deen’s attitudes about race, as expressed in a court deposition, are offensive to most of us, but there’s something not right about all the commercial entities associated with her heading for the exits.

Certainly, a celebrity with backward views should be called out on them. But hey, this woman, after all the discussion about her “empire,” is a chef. She writes cookbooks. She’s on TV. What do her views on race have to do with cooking?

Those interested in karma should have been satisfied enough to learn that a guru of what many consider to be unhealthy cooking should be diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. But at least that has a relationship to what she does for a living. Do you think the lily-livered corporations that are now throwing her under the bus are all doing so simply out of moral outrage, and that their own bottom lines had nothing to do with it?

A few years ago, a city councilman in a Southern California town near where I lived came under fire for a term he used during a meeting. As I recall, the council was talking about the use of gasoline-powered leaf blowers by the overwhelmingly Latino population of gardeners. The councilman, again as I recall, was trying to point out that these gardeners needed these devices in their jobs -- but he used the term “wetback” in talking about his own gardener. The thing was, this council member was an older man, and he didn’t use the word as a slur at all. For him, in his woeful ignorance, it was simply a term of description. He should have known better -- but he didn’t.

Nevertheless, local racial activists, as well as many from L.A., descended on the town and hounded the councilman into resignation. Even the gardener who had worked for this fellow for many years tried to defend him, but to no avail.

If we applied the same principle to the work of the late Dr. William Shockley, we might not be using any of the electronic devices that interconnect us today. Dr. Shockley expressed notoriously unorthodox and offensive views about race – but he was the inventor of the transistor, the basis of the modern semiconductor industry.

Hitler is credited with making German trains run on time and building the autobahns. Should good Germans be walking to work?

Paula Deen herself made a tearful apology on TV, saying that she hoped anyone who had never used a racial slur would cast a stone at her and kill her, paraphrasing the famous Bible story. You may or may not accept the apology or even believe it was genuine.

Maybe mercy and compassion just don’t work in this case. She should have known better, and at least kept her backward views to herself.

But shouldn’t punishments fit crimes?

So You Think You Know This Court

We can’t be blamed if our heads are spinning – even though it may not be in the same direction for everyone.

Not 24 hours ago, the U.S. Supreme Court was being panned for its decision to throw out key provisions of the Voting Rights Act – a move interpreted by many as a blow to equality. Now today, the Court majority has thrown out key provisions of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), declaring it unconstitutional. In addition, the Court left standing a lower court opinion blocking Proposition 8, though only on what amounts to a technicality. The decisions open the door to same-sex marriage in states that have approved it.

Fittingly, both of these Supreme Court rulings have the biggest impact in California. Like that state, the Court has a major fault running through it, and occasionally, it shakes big-time – and we try to predict that tectonic shift at our peril. Maybe it’s all about Justice Anthony Kennedy, the traditional swing vote – but no matter. Personally, I think we’re better off having a fractured Court. A monolithic one would seem more stable, but this way, none of us can stay happy – or unhappy – for very long.

With regard to the rulings themselves, they’re a hint that we have either evolved (like the President) to a higher spiritual plane, or we’re heading to the other place in a handbasket -- you pick. But as I have said often in this space, if a certain percentage of all mammals have homosexual preferences, why should human beings be any different? And isn’t making quick judgments about the rightness or wrongness of human sexual proclivities -- or who is entitled to love whom -- a little silly anyway? We shouldn't need a court to tell us that.

I Don't Care Where He Is

Edward Snowden, the former contractor who is credited with pulling the veil off of PRISM, the massive federal surveillance program, is in Moscow at this writing, reportedly asking Ecuador for asylum.

Hero or traitor, he picks some strange places to escape U.S. charges: Hong Kong (China) and now Moscow. He reportedly considered Cuba and Venezuela. Perhaps since Julian Assange was able to hide in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, Snowden figured he’d find some refuge in that South American country.

Those who think he’s a traitor would no doubt prefer to see him in the confined spaces of an American prison, but his other choices aren’t so great. If I were choosing places to live, Hong Kong, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela and Ecuador would probably not be high on the list. He can never again set foot in the United States or a country that’s too friendly with us if he wants to avoid capture. Those who want to see him paying a price for his misdeed might take some comfort from the fact that he will always have to be looking over his shoulder. As for Julian Assange, BTW, I don’t see the Ecuadorean embassy listed among London’s five-star hotels. Plus, he can’t use any free tickets to those West End shows.

It may be easy for others to conclude that Snowden is a hero, but heroes don’t always get an immediate ticker-tape parade.  We’ve only recently gotten close to the concept of honoring our own service members who fought in unpopular wars. Heroism usually requires a price of some kind, which Mr. Snowden is already paying.

Personally, I would prefer we spend as little time and money as possible on this fellow. And perhaps we’ll be a little more careful before we hire government contractors in the future.

One piece of advice, though, Ed: If I were you, I’d be careful to avoid open spaces. With this administration’s penchant for using drones, well, a round of golf might be a really bad idea right now.

Way Too Little, Way Too Late

Now that the infamous “red line” has been crossed – the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons on civilians, President Obama has decided that the United States should supply arms to the Syrian rebels. As I noted to friends yesterday, we seem to have a talent for finding the deepest part of the quicksand and stepping in it – or to be more accurate, sticking our toe in it to see if we can avoid getting sucked in.

All this is still officially pretty vague. According to reports, though, the arms we will supply to the Syrian rebels aren’t necessarily the ones they want: heavy weapons or those to shoot down aircraft.  Senator John McCain, long a hawk on this issue, believes we have to do more, including enforcing a no-fly zone.

The Assad regime has used chemical weapons on four separate occasions, according to our intelligence, killing up to 150 people. That’s awful. But it begs the question of why we didn’t care about the 100,000 or so others who have already died by more conventional means. As if the earlier atrocities committed by the regime were somehow acceptable.

So what is our goal here? Do we want to help the Syrian rebels win, or not? Will these measures really level the playing field? Continuing that analogy, leveling the playing field, at this stage, doesn’t stop the game, and if there is a winner, there’s little likelihood it’s going to be our friend.

I think our real objective should be – or should have been – knocking out or securing the chemical weapons to prevent their use – though perhaps they’ve been scattered to the point where we can’t get to them now.

Woulda, coulda, shoulda. If we’re going to change the balance in Syria, there has to be a commitment to do it. I still contend there was a point at which we could have intervened in this conflict early on and accomplished something without having to really go to war. But at this moment, Americans don’t have the stomach for the measures that seem necessary. It’s just too late to play catch-up.

Hero/Leaker Worship

Wherever he is now, there’s no question that Edward Snowden, who revealed the existence of the massive PRISM data-gathering program (or metadata, or whatever that’s called) is the most famous man on the planet – but is he a hero?

Personally, I’m not sure I’m ready to see him fitted him for a red cape quite yet. I actually had a Facebook friend who said Snowden should be compared to patriots who won the United States its independence from Britain. Really? Didn’t he violate a secrecy oath? I’m also a little bothered by the fact that he fled to Hong Kong – a little too close to China for my taste. And it has been pointed out that there were existing channels for whistleblowing, that the world stage wasn’t necessary.

Fine. Perhaps he could have used existing channels, but it might have been a long time before any of us actually heard the whistle. This way, we all heard it instantly.

Maybe I should be outraged at the existence of this kind of program. I’m not. It may even be a good idea in some respects. But do we deserve to know about it and to have a debate about it? Absolutely!

There are a couple of things that bother me about it, aside from the concept of surveillance (that word is troublesome, only because it implies someone’s actually looking at all this data at all times – that’s not happening). But I heard the feds are building a zillion-dollar facility somewhere to house all of this stuff  – a home for the “haystacks” in which the security folks would look for “needles” when learning of a terrorist threat. How many such facilities will be necessary going forward? Second, why is a 29-year-old contractor with no college degree given access to top secret information – and paid $200,000 a year? How many more Snowdens are we relying on to keep our secrets (and some secrets have to be kept)? Now that we know what we’re paying for, are we getting our money’s worth?

As I’ve said before, the average American can’t get too upset about privacy loss when he’s willing to sell his soul to the digital devil after seeing an online deal for a $100 flat-screen TV.

In my view, the only thing that’s really going to protect us from government abuse is SUNLIGHT. Snowden did us a favor. He ripped the black curtain off the window – but he didn’t exactly topple the Berlin Wall. Before he ascends into heaven – or descends to the other place – we all have something to discuss first.

Out of the Barn 2

The nightly cable new outrage festival was in full swing last night amid reports by the Washington Post and The Guardian that federal agencies had “back doors” into the servers of Silicon Valley companies to spy on Americans, ostensibly for collecting information on us to protect us against terrorism. I’d like to be able to tell you I’m surprised, but am not, and can only get outraged up to a point.

The story, of course, is bad news for the Obama administration, and casts the President himself as something of a hypocrite. While campaigning for office, he was critical of the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretap program, but the Post report reveals that he certainly can’t pretend he’s a champion of privacy.

While the government’s PRISM program is intended as a national security tool and is supposed to make us feel safer, in many respects it does exactly the opposite. If the government can collect information on all of us for national security reasons, the obvious fear is, suppose at some point down the road, the government decides to use this capability for other reasons?

That said, the civil libertarians can burst their blood vessels about big government, but they and the rest of us don’t get nearly as exercised about the data mining that’s already going on by the private corporations we all connect or deal with and what’s being done with that information about us. There is just as much potential for harm, if not more.

We do have to ask ourselves about our own complicity in all of this. Most of us carry devices that report exactly where we are at all times. Every time we use the Internet to look something up – maybe on a site we wouldn’t care to have others know we visited – that visit is being logged someplace, and presumably could come back to bite us later on.

And, I just can’t wait to hear the screams after private aerial drones go into widespread use. We’d better start thinking about getting ourselves fitted for lead-foil suits.

Although the Post story doesn’t surprise me, I certainly recognize the beneficial effect of investigative reporting like this. More than a year ago, I observed here that the privacy horse had long since left the barn. There may not be a lot we can do about that, but at least some entity is telling us where the horse is headed. And though it may be inconvenient, we still have a fundamental individual choice about whether we go along for the ride.

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The Wrong Questions

Last night, I caught myself asking, “Why Oklahoma City? What did they do to anybody?"

The area was hit with tornadoes only two weeks after the community of Moore was devastated by a twister. One of the tornadoes that affected the region last night was reported in Moore, though it was only a shadow of the earlier version. Even so, it was a tornado, and it was Moore. Last night’s destruction over the general area was widespread.

When you ask a question like, “Why them?” you are heading down the road preacher Pat Robertson wants you to travel – do you really want to go there? He has answered such questions, of course, by saying that disasters are visited upon areas that deserve it because of some pervading pattern of immorality, like Sodom and Gomorrah in the Bible.

But by those standards, parts of both coasts of the United States, including the place I’m living in, should have long since broken off and sunk into the sea – but I’m still here. And when you think of hotbeds of immorality, well, Oklahoma isn’t the first place that comes to mind.

So if you can’t think of a reason that God visits catastrophes on places like Oklahoma City, then you’re led to another question: Does God send such things? If he (she) doesn’t, who does?

The ultimate and most disturbing question is: If such awful things are allowed to happen to good people, is there a God at all? I would bet there is more than one person in Moore asking that question this morning – and most of us probably wouldn’t blame them.

We yearn to have such questions answered, and over time, we realize that nobody, least of all the Pat Robertsons of the world, can answer them for us. Peace is only achieved when we can answer them for ourselves – or when we can agree to stop asking those questions and move on to more important ones.

The only real progress comes in the answer to this: What are you going to do about it? That’s also a question that requires an individual answer, and answering that one is how we grow. Perhaps we can give God credit for helping us do that. Or not.

We don’t all grow the same way. It may be momentarily inspiring to see those people on TV standing in front of their flattened homes, telling reporters how they’re not discouraged and how they plan to rebuild in the same place. But for others, the answer may be, “I’m outta here!”

In the great scheme of things, of course, there is no “outta here” – if you live in the Plains and decide to leave, you’re simply trading in tornadoes for something else: hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, blizzards, wildfires or combinations of all of them. Building somewhere else isn’t going to keep s**t from happening to us.

It’s what we build after it happens to us that matters. It’s not about simply replacing a physical structure or possessions. It’s about whether tragedy can be transformed into a solid foundation for building a new life. That’s the question we should be trying to answer.

But if at this moment you’re standing in front of your flattened home, and you don’t feel like coming up with the answer right this minute to inspire the rest of us, well, far be it from me to judge you for it.