In spite

Ah, the insistency of life and speaking one's mind -- even in Iraq, where the average citizen lives in constant fear of assassination and terroristic activities, people are making their views known. With no way to print a newspaper, an enterprising man writes the day's news and views on pieces of paper he posts in the middle of Basrah. True, the stories are written without bylines, since anonymity is still safer than attaching one's name to words, but people are finding a way to speak in the midst of bombings and insurgency.

Humans are an amazing creation, are they not?

"Look at your one-week calendar. Examine it. What does it say about you? Which events will you remember in a year’s time?"

The above was the "tip of the day" from my day planner software. On really awful, horrendous, mind-numbingly bad days at work like today, I have to remind myself that this, too, shall pass, and a week or a month or a year from now, none of it will have mattered.

On the other hand, I guess I should think about it the opposite way -- what am I doing on a daily basis that a week or a month or a year from now will be worthy of memory? Am I striving to create goodness and light and unity that will last, or am I going through each day with no thought of tomorrow beyond whether I have a clean shirt to wear?

Pics from last week's trip to Louisiana/Mississippi Gulf Coast

NPR story - 7.15.05 a.m. - unfinished

To set the story straight from the outset: I listen to NPR each morning and evening on my commute to and from work, to get an idea of what's happening outside my own little world. I rarely watch the morning or evening news, and it's hit-or-miss whether I'll read any news stories on the web during the day. NPR is well-written and -edited, and their reporters are very, very good at what they do.

That said --

I've always known that NPR was quite liberal in its leanings; doesn't surprise me, and I listen to the news stories with a grain of salt, to balance their spin against my personal beliefs (which may or may not match the spin of the day, depending on which day it is). A story this morning, though, reminded me once again just how far left NPR's writers actually are. The piece was on Bush declining to speak at the NAACP convention, currently being held in Milwaukee. The first few lines spoke of Bush never speaking at one of the NAACP meetings as a standing president, and of his being the only president in the last 70 years not to do so. Of course, the inevitable statistics came up -- Bush garnered only 10% of the African-American vote in the 2004 election, ad nauseum. That was fine -- so far, only facts had come up in the story. Then came the quotes from the NAACP representatives: (to paraphrase) "I don't know why he doesn't want to speak to us -- he wants to forget that we are some of the people he's president over as well."

Since when did the NAACP speak for every black (I detest the splintering of America into "African-Americans" and "Latino-Americans" and so on) person out there? One of the main ideas of the story was that since Bush didn't speak to the NAACP conventioneers, he didn't speak to any blacks at all. I didn't realize that to be black in America, you had to sympathize with the NAACP. It would be somewhat analogous (in the south) to the KKK stating that since Bush hadn't made the keynote address at their annual meeting, he was refusing to speak for the white population. I'm not comparing the NAACP and KKK in an equal light; however, both are extremely political groups who take themselves quite seriously. As an American, free to think and act in the ways I see fit, I have contempt for those who attempt to compartmentalize humanity into groups.

One of the key issues in the NPR piece was the "polarization of America" with respect to race. I thought the Republican National Party leader, who did speak to the NAACP, made a good point in harking back to the aforementioned statistics about the 2004 election and stating that the Democrats are currently benefiting much more than Republicans from the lopsidedness of the black vote. This whole polarization issue refuses to die -- in the south, we see it so often, but I don't believe it's limited to my area; it's just out in the open here, rather than closeted behind supposedly open-minded doors.

Thoughts on another era

Music has power. From our primal instinct to create rhythm to the stirring of a long-submerged memory at a scrap of melody, music has the power to change us, remind us, invent us into something more than our normal selves. Though ever-present and seemingly common, music, in all its glorious permutations, has the ability to become larger than its roots, to calm or incite or simply be.

July 4th

Lazy brown river,
Twisting slowly like a Willy Wonka creation gone to mud
Snaking its way through lush green overhang
Hiding who-knows-what in its banks

On driving through Louisiana

Water is in my blood.

I don't think it's purely genetic nor environmental. I mean, I'm Pisces-born, and have lived in Florida, but I think that's more a matter of fate than of deciding my nature. Water moves me, more than an awe-inspiring sunset or mountain vista ever could. Those things are certainly beautiful, but a river winding through an overgrown streambed can stir in me much greater feelings of oneness, of being truly home, than any other natural view.

I can't fully explain the affinity to bodies of water; I don't swim well, and I'm truly frightened of the power of water. The yin-yang of my attraction involves a deep and awesome fear, one born of nearly drowning. Yet the pull remains, a force I feel as a physical thing, drawing me to water on a regular basis as if to get a fix. I am a water junkie, no more able to control the need than I am the working of my nervous system.