Midlife Meditation

I made a meme! (The original word was "God.") I've been seeing versions of this for years. Sometimes it's worded as a prayer: "Dear Lord/Jesus, please protect me from your followers." At other times, it's along the lines of Bill Maher's frequent observation that he's actually pretty fond of Jesus, he just wishes his followers would read his book (i.e. the Bible). It's a meme I tend to shake my head at: half a century of Methodism introduced me to thousands of sincere, generous, tolerant, sometimes progressive and even radical Christians. Unfortunately, there are prominent religious bigots out there giving the faith I was born into a bad name, and far too many of them are fully on board with a president who fits the Biblical description of the antiChrist better than any political figure in modern times (and yes, that's including Hitler). As you can see from the picture at the top of the page, I took the meme and made an adjustm...

She was running for President because "that's what girls do." Ah, Elizabeth. We treated you so poorly. By "we," I mean America, a country that uses a complex algorithm that skews rural, white, and male to choose who will run for, and become, president. It's not always skewed in that direction, though, as Elizabeth Warren has learned the hard way. The 2020 Democratic primary has come down to a seesaw between pragmatic and idealistic voters, and neither camp chose the most articulate, nimble, talented person to lead the country away from the Trump nightmare. Black voters who are the southern backbone of the Democratic party read the signs of the times and went with Joe Biden, a tongue-tied old man with a big heart who they believed most capable of defeating Trump. Progressives, the other spine of the party, were already fixated on the steadfastness of Bernie Sanders. I'm growing tired of the sheer volume of defensive Bernie posts I'm seeing ...

The ninth, tenth, thirteenth, twelfth, and eleventh Doctors. In my hour of sickness, the doctor I turned to was a 2000-year-old alien with thirteen faces. It took me almost fifty years to warm up to Doctor Who. Star Trek , Lost in Space , Battlestar Galactica --I was on board for all of those shows. I even enjoyed The Six Million Dollar Man  and Space:1999  for the first few years of their runs. Finally, I decided to check out Doctor Who  sometime last year, and while I wasn't immediately hooked, I warmed up over time to the show's strange mixture of whimsy and over-the-top space/time fantasy stories. This week, as I've been stuck on the couch with a respiratory virus, I've been powering through the complete three seasons of the twelfth doctor, and today just met the thirteenth actor (and first woman) to inhabit the role. Doctor Who  is unapologetically British. The show's universe--and it actually spans many galaxies--is populated entirely by aliens wi...