Forgiveness for the Uninformed, Rage Against the News Machine / 2-6-12

Not forgiveness for the "Uniformed." That would be a very condescending post.

I kid, because defensive mechanism. In all honesty, I'm not sure what the point of this little essay is, yet. I'm going to start with a list, follow it with between one and a dozen observations, leading to a semblance of a point, perhaps gracing it all with a counterpoint, if you're lucky. I plan to offer a conclusiony item near the endy part.

(Not sure how it's all going to turn out. This is just how they teach you to operate in school. Begin to write, then think.)

Pre-thinking stage: engage.

a) Israel is thinking of starting a little war with Iran.

b) A riot killed 79 people in Egypt last week, and injured hundreds. The aftershock riot, a couple days later, killed 10 more.

c) Syria continues to knock off its citizens, day by day. Russia and China are vetoing any U.N. action.

d) Oh yeah, speaking of Russia, as hundreds of its citizens continue to die of cold, hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets in protest and support for apparent King Vladimir Putin.

e) The Republicans are choosing a presidential candidate, one state at a time. One guy seems to have taken charge, but it's been a pretty topsy-turvy ride so far.

f) Facebook is readying for what could be the largest IPO of all time. Hell, throw moderation out the window. This WILL be the largest one of all time.

g) Unemployment is dipping quickly.

h) Same-sex marriage is being considered/approved in three more states (WA, NJ, MN).

i) A Super Bowl was played yesterday. A good one, too. Record viewership for the game and the halftime show.

j) Outrage at the Susan B. Komen For the Cure's plan to defund Planned Parenthood caused the board to reverse its decision.

k) Citizens United is now two years old. The court case that paved the way for unlimited (unlimited!) donations from a single entity to a political campaign. It's being challenged everywhere, because most people are against bribery. (Unlimited donations! Pause for a second and think that one over.)

Those are just the top stories I can recite off the top of my head. A bit of shallow research reveals that a few other significant things are also ongoing.

l) Russian scientists are about to finish drilling through two miles of Antarctic ice and reach a pressurized underground lake that has not been explored for 100 million years. What's that again about the Mayan prophecy?

m) More European countries' debt ratings are in danger of being downgraded as they begin to deal with the consequences of unfunded spending programs. Like France and stuff. Big financial problems ahead, probably, with worldwide ramifications.

n) Fidel Castro was seen in public, touting a memoir. Remember him?

o) Hey, guess what: this little thing called "Occupy" is still happening, with peaceful protesters being mistreated by police every day, First Amendment be damned.

Thinking stage: engage.

First pointlet, then is that all that stuff listed above happened or continued to happen last week. How can a person possibly stay informed? Reading enough on each of these topics, just enough to rise above mal-informed to semi-informed, would take a person's entire trove of free time. No matter how much that person had! 168 hours might be sufficient, on a weekly basis, provided the person were a very fast reader. And possessed a time machine.

One could read headlines only. I have lots of days when that's all I can do. The experience is very unsatisfying, like a daily diet composed of fourteen snacks instead of three and a half meals.

I didn't even include any of the gossip "news" that bubbles at the surface -- Justin Bieber this, Kim Kardashian that, Brad Pitt this, MIA that. Best leave those "stories" to the professionals.

No sense in trying to stay up on the local stuff, either. Sticking strictly with national and international stories above, and just the big ones at that. Property taxes going up or serial killer strikes again in your town? You could hardly know that, unless it was your job to know so many things. So very many things.

That's why, today, pointlet two: I'm asking for and granting forgiveness to all uninformed parties everywhere. I am extending, right now, a blanket -- nay, a veritable quilt of mercy to all planetary inhabitants. You didn't know the city of Berkeley voted to pull out $300 million in assets from a large bank, so it could place the money in a more socially conscious place? Peace be with you. You didn't catch the headlines about the quake in the Philippines? Shalom anyway, Allahu Akbar and all that jazz. You holding on to something earth-shattering I didn't know about? I humbly beg your forgiveness.

There's too much information. It's too easy to disseminate. It's getting harder and harder to sort through it all, let alone keep up with a story for more than a day or two.

I'm not sure how this will turn out, still, but it appears a major point has stumbled into this post: We, as a nation, are bombarded with news. We've become are too adept at reporting stories. I submit that we have left the land of diminishing returns, news-wise, and have bravely set foot on a new patch of terra firma, where the amount of information available now places too much power in the hands of the aggregators and the opinion makers.

An amateur news-gatherer, or a semi-interested news reader, who has literally millions of informative blogs to choose from, is ironically more at the mercy now of news aggregators than ever before.

I can't stress enough how ironic the situation has become. There are hundreds of major news outlets slanted this way or that, and hundreds more trying so very hard to be unslanted. Old media and new media have merged -- you tell me how we should tell them apart. How do you find enough to make up your mind on any issue of importance? How do you find a reliable source, who will give you facts and analysis you can trust, and I don't mean based on ideology, but on sound thought processes and verifiable events?

For so very many of us, you don't. You stop by Daily Kos and the Huffington Post on your lunch hour if you're a liberal, catch some Rush Limbaugh on talk radio in the car and log on at redstate for a few minutes in the evening if you're a conservative. Why? Because you're not going to spend half your day researching a major issue or story, unless it's your job.

The junkiest of new junkies among us will always devour enough material to satisfy their appetites, and if they do it right, they'll turn that information into knowledge. The rest of us? Good freakin luck.

I don't think the current state of news presentation is healthy for our republic. But I also don't have a solution. Feel free to suggest one.

Ho, Ho, Ho Say Can You See / 11-28-11

With Thanks being all safely Given and out of our public consciousness for eleven months and three weeks, another holiday takes center stage, which it has already taken, because it could.

I'm talking about Christmas! No, really! (ed. note: strike two previous sentences)

Christmas, the superpower of holidays.

At its core, Christmas is good. It grew out of a fantastic idea, a revolutionary idea -- God born as a human! God as a child? What! God as a finite, mortal being. What an idea. If you haven't considered it in a while, do so again. Boggle your mind.

Christmas is brimming with exuberance, optimism, gregariousness, charity. Christmas time moves people. Siblings spend their precious funds on siblings; strangers feed strangers in soup kitchens; poor kids receive gifts from anonymous donors who drop them off at suddenly altruistic places of business. The Christmas spirit is uplifting and real. Just look at the results.

If you're a certain brand of person, you would put your life on the line for Christmas. An edict barring the celebration of Christmas, under penalty of death, would not stop people from celebrating the holiday.

What I'm trying to say is that good people, given the right circumstances, would give their lives for Christmas. Because Christmas is capable of bringing out the best in us.

And Christmas can also be rude, or even ugly. It pokes its head where it doesn't belong, like November 3rd. Uninvited, and all. It can even make quite a mess, in spite of its good intentions: have you seen shoppers assault each other for bits of branded plastic or fur-covered batteries? If not, you've not been paying very good attention.

For the last two months of the year, the marketplace pleads for your money, with no limits on its cravenness. My God, ads on the radio urge us to buy CARS for our loved ones. There is no room for restraint at the inn.

There are not too many ways to say it: Christmas gets used. The Starbucks in which I sit does not serve a $4.75 eggnog latte to spread holiday cheer. (Hint: It's more for the crazy profit margin.) The big-box electronics store doesn't hawk its $799 TV (marked down $200!) just so you can share quality family time watching "Elf" every weekend.

And Christmas is part legend, a malleable one which gathers all kinds of mythology along the way. You think Abraham Lincoln is amazing? All he did was hold together a nation by sheer force of will. Santa delivers presents to every (deserving) kid faster than the speed of sound. And time. And light. You think it was cool when American ingenuity put a man on the moon 42 years ago? Mary's water broke at the end of a hundreds-of-miles-long donkeyback ride, then she birthed a deity in a feeding trough.

Christmas' ideals exhort us to be better. We often rise to the challenge.

Christmas is also covered in warts. If you take the time to look.

Boiling it down even further: Each year, when the calendar completes its circle, here we stand, ready to celebrate the greatest holiday on earth, because it's who we are, and without Christmas, many of us would feel a little empty, a little less significant, a little littler.

Holy Santa, America is Christmas.

Ten Years. Now What? / 9-11-11

Happy September 11 to you.

I know, right? What do you say? How do you, well, celebrate? Celebrate? Remember? What. Gah.

Me? I slept in. I helped my brother move. I picked blackberries with my boys. We had a family dinner. I watched football, and agonized over the waning minutes of the fourth quarter of a Cowboys-Jets game (yep) that would mean fantasy league victory or defeat. (Thanks, Tony Romo, for your late-game ADHD moments!)

The most altruistic things I did, I would have done any other day. Packed a few boxes, moved some cabinets, made desserts for the neighbor kids, spent time being a good dad. It could have been Octemberpril 34th, for all the attention I paid the calendar today. I could have freakin' mowed the lawn, it was that kind of day.

That means something. For sure, some folks made today a day of service, or they did something significant to better the nation. Or they laid a flower somewhere, or they lit a candle, or they flew their flag.

Aw crap. The flag. Totally meant to do that. Our family loves displaying the flag. We take great pride in this nation's ideals, as symbolized by the Stars and Stripes. We flew it on Memorial Day 2011, Flag Day 2011, July Fourth 2011, and it'll probably make its way out there at Veterans Day 2011 too. Missed it today, though.

That means something.

Hm. There are no universally accepted 9/11 customs. It's only been ten years, after all. I didn't expect we'd all be exchanging gifts or sending family picture postcards or dressing up in red, white and blue, or anything like that on such short notice. But the event that was meant to unite us -- the event that did unite us, if ever so briefly -- has instead served mainly as a politicized flash point that separates Americans... often along party lines.

How you feel about the response to Sept. 11 -- a bungled war in Afghanistan, a couple trillion dollars and thousands of lives spent to messily redo Iraq, a ten-year manhunt for bin Laden that ended in a somewhat less than satisfying way -- how you feel about our last decade as a nation is bound to color how you commemorate it. And for half of us, we look at the last decade as an embarrassment, a missed opportunity, a stretch of history we'd rather forget quickly than relive annually. And then, for the other half of us, our military achievements of the last ten years have been giant foreign policy victories that have strengthened American hegemony, made us safer here at home, and crushed Al Qaeda like an unwanted insect.

Yeah, that's not the makings of a national holiday. Not even close.

OK, fine, maybe we can all agree on honoring first responders, firefighters, police officers, and ordinary heroes among us. I still get emotional thinking about what those folks accomplished that day. The bravery exhibited still floors me. When I put myself in their shoes...

But, like half the nation, I am shamed by the unconscionable actions we took between Sept. 12, 2001 and today. Such a colossal waste of life, money and such a wasted opportunity.

I'm not going to say that means the terrorists win. As comedian John Oliver likes to say, the terrorists are morons.

(Thank goodness, that means something too.)

But I think that in a way, America loses, until we figure out how to disassociate the date itself from the tragic, obscene, shameful acts of terrorism we perpetrated on innocent civilians, using that near-holy day of September 11, 2001 as a pretext.

So, no, not Happy September 11. Maybe someday. Or someday, Solemn September 11. Or Selfless September 11.

Can't wait until we get there, but like so many others these days, I am not hopeful.

Patriot Facts / 6-23-11

My cat is fluffy.

(They teach you how to write compelling lead sentences, called "ledes," at journalism school. I think I slept in that day.)

So fluffy, sometimes we call him "Floofy." And by we, I mean someone in our household made it up as a clever nickname, and it caught on, because cute, and now the cat gets called that nickname more often than his totally awesome given name, a name which someone brilliant in our household pulled out of thin air, but we'll get to that part in due time, within some other hideously constructed run-on sentence.

Fear not. This is not a post about my cat.

So my five-year-old and I walk out the front door the other day, and there's the cat, rolling around in the front yard. The boy walks over to pet the cat on the belly. Those two get along great. It's sweet.

Fear not. This is not a post about my five-year-old.

But the five-year-old DOES say, mid-stroke, "He's so floofy."

Me: "He is. Imagine this, though, Alex -- the other day, I petted a cat that was EVEN softer than Sherlock."

(Which is, again, such a boss name for a cat. Seriously. Props to whoever came up with that. Kudos.)

Alex: *jaw drops open*

Me: "S'true."

Alex: *exaggeratedly pained expression*

Alex: "Dad, why are you being mean to Floofy?"

Suspend all remaining fear. This is a post about patriotism. Because having a discussion about what's wrong with America is too often like trying to explain to a small child that his pet can be outdone in some facet by another pet.

Me: "Well, in Sweden, their infant mortality rate --"

Patriot blinded by jingosim: "Socialists."

Me: "The thing is, our education administrators could take a cue from --"

PBJ: "We're the best."

Me: "Mounting deficits in Greece could wreck that nation's economy --"

PBJ: "Can't happen here."

Me: "Health insurance is guaranteed by the Canadian governm --"

PBJ: "Pussies."

Me: "Heart disease is lower in countries that outlaw chemicals in food and --"

PBJ: "McNuggets kick ass. 20 for $4.99, dude."

Facts. I got 'em. (Pardon the lack of links. Mostly trusting wikipedia here anyway.)

The U.N. lists 33 countries ahead of the U.S. in infant mortality rate. Singapore, Slovenia, Israel, New Caledonia all come out with better results.

Results of worldwide testing in math, reading and science in 2010 reveal U.S. students to be "average" among the 70 nations who participated.

The CIA's factbook for 2011 estimates that 49 countries have a higher life expectancy at birth than the United States. Jordan is one of those 49. Bosnia too.

We spend between 5 and 10 percent each year, as a government, on interest stemming from our national debt. (Just the interest, mind you.) This is in part because our national debt represents about 60 percent of our GDP. You know how much Russia's national debt is, relative to their GDP? Less than 10 percent. Huh. Wonder if that'll ever matter.

I love my country. But can we just admit already that as Americans, we could learn A LOT from how the rest of the world conducts its business? Can we just get over ourselves, face our deficiencies, and actually begin to address them?

Or will countless reports that highlight our warts continue to get swept under the suicidal banner of "No need to worry about that, we're the best"? I faintly hope not.