Happy New Year

Reflecting back on the past year, we seem to be an increasingly offended people.  We seem to be increasingly angry and annoyed by those around us, particularly when those around us seem to get such joy from being annoying.  Whether it is the opposing party in Washington or Springfield, MTV or A&E, people are really starting to tick us off. 

And granted, there is no shortage of really bad behavior.  This year our fellow Americans have been rude, ignorant, and often gross.  Those charlatans across the aisle have made terrible decisions that have most likely caused irreplaceable damage to our fragile republic.  Those “entertainers” on stage and in front of the camera have said things that polite people do not say, and made gestures that decent folk do not make.  Due to our seemingly abundant leisure time and media access, we did not have to look far this year to find something so offensive it merited posting and reposting, tweeting and retweeting, again and again and again and again.

Being offended, of course, is not new.  Our cultural ancestors became so offended in the last quarter of the 18^th century that they started shooting people.  When the shooting stopped they took a break and created a really impressive form of government, and then they started shooting people again.  As American history has unfolded over the last two centuries, it has really been mostly a series of arguments interspersed by dodging bullets.

In some respects, this arguing and fighting is natural, both biologically and culturally.  Like all animals, on one level we fight for limited resources.  As human beings accustomed to debate, on another level we fight for our ideas and ideals.  Without this struggle and panache for conflict, we would not really be who we are.  After all, before the majestic bald eagle was adopted as our national symbol, a much lowlier yet no less dangerous indigenous animal was often used as aggressive icon:  the rattlesnake.  Well before we minted coins with fancy Latin phrases or lofty inclinations toward God, a much earthier motto prevailed:  “Don’t Tread on Me.”

The curious thing about rattlesnakes though, is that they do not have a habit of just biting random ankles. They do not crawl around the North American underbrush looking for trouble.  Rodents?  Yes.  Nourishment?  Of course.  But a fight?  That’s just dumb.  Both rattlesnakes and bald eagles have better things to do than look for things to bother them.  They are usually pretty busy struggling to pass on their DNA.   

We are human beings, though, and admittedly, our existence is characterized by much more than mere survival.  We are not snakes.  We are not birds.  Sometimes, often times, we do need to fight for more than just our lives.  As moral agents, it is our responsibility to fight the good fight against the vices of this world.

But what, exactly, constitutes the good fight?  What ideas and practices are actually worth getting upset about?  The Gadsden flag motto was not, “Don’t Annoy Me,” or “Don’t Offend Me.”  It was “Don’t Tread on Me,” and getting “treaded” upon is not the same thing as being offended.  A snake that is treaded upon is in physical danger.  A snake that is offended is just being a cartoon.

           

 Thus, as 2013 draws to its exasperated close, perhaps we should consider a different approach.  Perhaps we should ask ourselves a new set of questions in 2014.  Instead of getting annoyed by other people’s bad behavior and “discussing” it into perpetuity, what would happen if we focused more on our own less-than-post-worthy antics?  Instead of being offended every time we turned on the television or logged onto the computer, what would happen if we quietly and diligently “tended to our own gardens,” so to speak, and dirtied idle hands making certain our own branches bore more fruit?

             

What might happen to our nation if we all focused more on the giant planks of wood sticking out of our own eyes and less on the specks of sawdust we see in each other?  If nothing else, wouldn’t we at least have better vision?

Christmas Card, 2013

This past year has taught us many things, but perhaps the most important life lesson to come out of 2013 is this: brochures lie.  Traveling with small children is a bad idea.  If you see a brochure full of smiling little kids, those kids have just been fed an entire bar of chocolate.  Brochures trick us into believing that we, too, could enjoy a relaxed, fun-filled day of deep sea fishing with the entire family.  You cannot.  It is time we face the facts.  There are some places in this world where parents should not bring anyone under the age of ten, and that place is outside the home.

Our most ridiculous “life lesson” of the year occurred in February.  We thought it would be a nice idea to take the kids to an indoor water park for our daughter’s birthday, and so the four of us secured a room at such a place in Indianapolis.

Things went fairly well until we pulled into the hotel parking lot and were informed by both children that, despite having had access to a delicious McDonald’s breakfast ninety minutes before, they were now deliriously hungry and could only be satiated with a delicious McDonald’s lunch. So we bought them cheeseburgers.  They were delicious.  Unfortunately, at least one of the sandwiches was perhaps undercooked, as our son threw up on himself mere seconds after finishing his meal. 

If you have ever cleaned up this kind of mess, the one were the mess has been stolen from the toddler’s stomach and redistributed onto his clothes, the floorboard and, most importantly, the cracks and crevices of the car seat, then you know that this is not how wonderful travel memories begin.  This joy of discovery continued a half-hour later upon entering our hotel room, which sported a leaking roof and smelled like an understaffed dog kennel.  Now we had competing disgusting odors vying for supremacy, so we cleaned off our son’s clothes as well as we could and found a new room.

By this point the kids were anxious to take advantage of the water park, so we decided my wife would change them into their swimsuits while I finished brining our unnecessarily large array of belongings into the hotel.  This too, was a bad idea, as our son, at that point in his life, had just grown tall enough to reach most door handles.  In an admirable display of comic genius, he chose to make his escape from the hotel room not only when he was entirely naked, but as were his mother and sister.

Thus, he shot down the hallways sans clothes.  My wife grabbed a towel and gave chase.  The door shut behind her.  Locked.  Our daughter, who is capable of being hysterical on an absolute whim, began to shriek like a crazy person because she was alone in a strange hotel room and believed she was trapped while her mostly naked family members were running down the hallway outside.

Because desperation is, of course, the mother of intense foot speed, my wife soon snatched her youngest and began to plead with her oldest to “please open the door mommy needs to put on her clothes!”  As mentioned, the hotel door was pretty easy to open from the inside, and so the remarkably amusing scene was kept pretty short.  Our daughter, still sobbing, opened the door.  My wife, nearly sobbing, entered the door, and then that door was shut and locked by deadbolt.

The only thing that kept me from asking the obvious question upon returning to the room, which would have been “Why in the world did you lock the door with the deadbolt if you knew I was bringing stuff up?” was divine providence. After all, asking that question under those circumstances would have probably been grounds for justifiable homicide.  God clearly did not want me to die at that point, because who, then, would be available to bring up the rest of our wardrobe?

This story should end now, but it does not, because we have not yet reached the part where we had to evacuate the building at 4:17 in the morning.  Usually such predawn exits occur due to false fire alarms.  This alarm, though, was not false, because the elevator nearest our room, perhaps the oldest in the state, really was on fire.  Now, instead of half the family running down the hallway entirely naked, the entire family ran down the hallway with pajamas and coats.  Fortunately I grabbed the keys, so we quickly found suitable shelter in our vehicle, which, of course, still smelled like toddler vomit.

Despite this misadventure, we just recently took our children out in the open again, albeit with much less public nudity.  We took them to Indiana, of all places, but this time, to minimize our exposure, we avoided the state’s capital and instead went to French Lick.  Here we stayed at the historic French Lick Resort and enjoyed a sugary ride on their version of the Polar Express.  Here we met three different incarnations of Santa Claus himself, each of whom was capable of mystifying our daughter and alarming our son. 

Here we dead bolted our room immediately and avoided fast food hamburgers.  We may be silly for traveling with our children, but some lessons cannot be ignored. 

So, in closing, we hope you all have a Merry Christmas and a blessed New Year.  And remember to always lock the door.  

"Am I on the nice list?"

"I am?!  Even after Indy?  Yeah!"

May the Force Be with Us. Forever. Seriously, they will make these movies until the sun explodes.

Congratulations if you are reading this.  You have survived yet another exciting Black Friday shopping event.  You have survived Black Friday, Chartreuse Thursday, (the holiday formerly known as Thanksgiving) and you now find yourself in the middle of Broke Blue Saturday. 

Before this year, I had never participated directly in Black Friday, although I did pick up my wife once to take her to breakfast after she had been shopping for EIGHT HOURS.  This curb-side pick-up, though, is the closest I had ever come to the mayhem that is the exclamation point in our profanity-laced holiday sentence.  Lest we ever forget why much of the world offers us the one-fingered wave whenever we turn around to tie our shoes, we merely need to briefly examine some Black Friday security videos. 

            “Oh, yeah,” we will mutter while inspecting the footage of adults literally punching each other to secure a video game filled with characters digitally punching each other.  “I guess that is kind of messed up.”

            This column, though, is not about Black Friday of this year, or even Christmas of this year, two topics that we can probably all agree are much too passé to consider this late in November.  This column is instead about the Christmas season of 2015, which will undoubtedly be saturated by the December 18^th release of Star Wars Episode VII: The Return of a New Pile of Money.

Like many dorks around the world, I experienced an authentic emotional response upon learning a few months ago that George Lucas had sold Star Wars. Due to our steady food supply and indoor plumbing, many of us in the United States are often forced into creating our own dilemmas, and this dilemma, the one where the Walt Disney corporation gets to decide what Darth Vader’s grandchildren do with their pretend lives, has filled me with a pathetic degree of anxiety.

This concern is undoubtedly related to the fact that my connection to Star Wars has deep roots.  The first movie I watched in a theater, way back in 1977, was the original Star Wars.  Because my parents happened to be visiting a friend who lived in Los Angeles at the time, I actually had the privilege of watching the movie in Hollywood, of all places, in the actual Grauman’s Chinese Theater.  Star Wars paraphernalia permeated much of my childhood, and although I eventually put the toys away, the enthusiasm for the franchise never really left.

            More importantly, I am not alone.  Countless people throughout the world have devoted an unjustifiable amount of their memory to this cultural phenomenon.  Thus, in some respects, we are glad that George Lucas has allowed the story to continue.  We are pleased in a weird little way that our own children will be able to experience some of the space operatic magic that infused so much of our own formative years.

            However, another part of us, the part that believes we somehow “own” the version of the story we were told, is concerned.  After all, we were told a story about a very flawed human who succumbs to temptation with very grave results.  We were told a story about a son who risked his own life to save that flawed human from his own inner demons.  That is the story we were told.  That is our story.  We assumed that when Vader was killed and Anakin redeemed, the story was over. 

The rebels win, the Empire loses, and peace reigns throughout the galaxy far, far, away. Right?  Apparently not.  Apparently something has gone amiss.  I suppose we will find out in two years. 

In the meantime and in closing, let us recall another little band of rebels who fought against a greedy empire many, many years ago, in a land not far away at all.  These rebels, too, won their victory, and a few years afterward their leader spoke certain words to pass down through posterity. 

 “Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God,”  George Washington proclaimed on October 3, 1789, “to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor…I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being…we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks...”

Washington continues about all the things for which the infant nation ought be thankful:  victory in the war, civil and religious liberties, the rational institution of a working government.  Things we now take for granted. 

And great Black Friday shopping deals, of course.  Washington just goes on and on about all the great deals.

One a Day

Like many families, we have chosen to take a proactive approach to the numerous changes taking place in the American health care system.  Although it is still early in the game to make a historically acute judgment call, preliminary indicators of the President’s Affordable Care Act suggest that it is not cool.  Depending on what television network you are watching,  this legislation will either give some Americans access to health care after countless glitches are worked out,  or it will enslave us all in some kind of quasi-Marxist death-scape where an insurance premium cost three fingers and an ear lobe.  However, since it has been my observation that the future is very rarely as good or as bad as people promise, my family and I have chosen what we believe is the middle ground and have invested in a fancy new treadmill.

Why a treadmill, you may ask?  Well, why not?  A treadmill in your home says to the world, “Hey, world, it doesn’t really matter to me if the weather is too hot or too cold or too wet, I can run whenever I want.  I can run once a day or once a week, or, as recent history has suggested, once a month.  So watch it with your attitude, world! I own my health!”

            We also have in our basement a set of very extreme exercise DVD’s.  These are the DVDs where the very extreme instructor shouts out borderline-abusive comments while doing hundreds of weird-looking push-ups.  Despite having owned these DVDs well past the ninety-days needed to transform my life, I still look like an aged Peter Parker before his spider bite.

Besides thinking very seriously about exercising, we are also buying more nutritious food, such as fresh fruits and vegetables, many of which get eaten before they spoil.  We have even gone so far recently as to replace hamburger in our chili with quinoa.  Believe it or not, quinoa is a real word and a real thing; a so-called super food from South America full of protein.   Like many super foods, is it most appealing when eaten with non-super foods, like excessive amounts of melted cheese. We ended up freezing most of the chili, as is our habit, and will most likely add some other ingredients to it when it is thawed, such as hamburger and flavor.

Perhaps the most promising development to come out of our skyrocketing insurance premiums is that our children, too, have decided to take a greater interest in their own health.  Candy Maker, the game in which they whisper to each other the words, “Candy Maker” before sneaking into the pantry to snatch some suckers from their stash of old parade loot, has declined from a daily exercise to a few times a week.  The most inspirational member of the family, though, has to be our toddler son, who pounced on his own health destiny a few weeks ago by gobbling up seven adult gummy vitamins in less than a minute.

Now, by “inspirational” I mean terrifying, of course, because the bottle of adult gummy vitamins suggest that even adults, which he is not, should only consume two in a twenty-four hour period.  This intense health moment led to my very first phone call to poison control, where I was quickly put on hold due to, and I quote, “budget restraints.”  Now, I am not an economics expert, nor am I a health professional or even an elected official.  However, I do know what a budget is, and it seems to me that one place that really ought not be susceptible to “restraint” is the phone number people call when they need immediate advice about something that might kill them.  It’s kind of in the name:  POISON.  People who call 911 when that operator is too busy are often told to call poison control.  I was not told to hang up and call any alternative number, so instead I watched my very satisfied son run around the living room as if he had just won the sugar lottery.

Eventually I was the given the privilege of talking to a real human, who told me that gummy vitamins are not toxic and that my son did not need to be rushed to the hospital.  I was also told that if the vitamins contained iron, then he might suffer from some minor digestive issues, which meant nothing to me whatsoever because the boy has had minor digestive issues for the last twenty-six months of his life.

To conclude, never mind what the pundits and politicians on TV tell you about health care.  We are all going to die someday, anyway.  Prior to this, I predict we will pay more for health care than what it is worth, and I also assume that the care we receive will be less than what we deserve.  That is life, which, as mentioned, will someday cease.  If you like your doctor, he or she will probably not like you.  If you like your current health insurance plan, you probably do not understand all the words in that health insurance plan.  The best thing you can do today for your health is turn off the news, grab a bottle of water, and go for a walk. 

            And be sure to take your vitamins.

Gardening

The following is a parable about gardening:

A very wealthy man had fifty plots of land full of gardens.  These gardens were laid out in a variety of shapes.  Some of them were square, others rounded, some lengthy, and some quite short.  The soils of these gardens were mostly good and the weather was mostly good.   The gardeners themselves—the foremen, the planters, the tenders, the pickers—were mostly good as well.

These gardeners, for the most part, were not paid a large sum of money by the wealthy man, but he respected them very much.  The gardeners were given good tools and much time to do their work.  The wealthy man understood that his servants, being as they worked hard and were well trained, knew how to grow seeds into plants.

            Life was not perfect, of course, as nothing on this earth ever is.  Some soil soured, the sun did not always shine, and not every seed grew.  But life went on, and the very wealthy man slept well at night with the satisfaction that surely he had the finest gardens in all the land.

As time passed, though, more of the soil began to sour, which made it more difficult for seeds to grow.  The sun, once so strong, began to hide behind clouds more often.  This alarmed the wealthy man.  This alarmed the gardeners.  Soon the wealthy man, although he was not really a gardener himself, decided he could help his seeds grow by giving advice.  He gave the gardeners some unfamiliar tools to use for gardening.

But still the soil soured, and still the sun hid, and still more seeds did not grow.  This alarmed the wealthy man even more, and so he went back to the gardeners.

            “We need a new way to garden.  What you are doing is not working.”

            The gardeners were not so sure about that, but they were hard workers and wanted the seeds to grow very much, and so they tried new tools and learned new ways to garden.

            The soil and weather continued to sour, however, and the seeds struggled to grow.  The wealthy man’s concern soon turned to anger.

            “Why are so many plants wilting?”  He thundered at his workers.  “Aren’t you taking care of them?”

            “Yes, sir.”

            “Then you need retrained in how to use even newer tools.  You need to try newer ways to tend the seeds.   You older gardeners need punished for these shorts crops; you must work an extra hour past sundown.  You younger gardeners need to know more about gardening in the first place; you must pass an extra inspection before sunrise.  These ideas will fix these problems.  If they don’t, each of you will be sorry.”

            The gardeners began to grow weary of the wealthy man’s anger, but they loved the seeds very much, and so they did what they were told and worked as hard as they could.  They worked even harder than they knew they could.  They worked hard in the day tending their fields, and they worked hard at night learning about new ways to garden.  (Although they were not quite sure the new ways to garden were really new at all, but were mostly just an old way to garden with a fancier name.)

            But the soil continued to sour, and the sun hid behind dark clouds almost every day, and thus many seeds did not grow.  The wealthy man’s anger turned to fury.  He read about gardens in distant lands where seeds grew up strong and tall, and his fury turned into rage.

            And thus he called a meeting.

            “How is it that I have spent so much time and money giving you new tools and new ideas, and still our seeds do not grow?  How is it that I read about seeds in distant lands that grow strong and tall while many of our seeds creep slowly and rarely reach the sky?”

            These were not questions meant to be answered, of course, by anyone at the meeting but himself.  Before the wealthy man could open up his new box of tools, however, an angry young gardener broke her rake across her knee and threw it to the earth. 

The break of the rake cracked angry in each ear, and before the wealthy man could reply she spoke.

            “A tool is a tool.  It cannot mend the soil.  An idea is an idea.  It cannot shine the sun.  In distant lands, some seeds are not even planted.  But in this land we plant all our seeds, to give each of them a chance to grow.  The questions you ask are hollow and foolish.  A better question, the question I ask, is this:  How is it that in a land where the soil has become so sour, and in a land where the sun almost never shines, can such a garden grow?  Look around you, and see.”

            The wealthy man, still quite angry, looked around at his fifty plots of land.  He saw many of his seeds struggling up above the contaminated soil toward a sun struggling to shine.  He saw that most of his seeds had indeed sprouted, but many of them had not.

He shook his head.

            “No.  These seeds do not grow strong because you each have become too lazy.  You visit with each other too much, and thus you will no longer be allowed to talk while working.  Perhaps then, once you only work and never talk, and if we try out some of these new…”

            But no one ever heard what his new idea was, because the sound of fifty thousand breaking rakes is a very loud sound.