Midlife Meditation

Mid-twentieth century students practicing for the apocalypse. No, I'm not that  old. Duck and cover drills ended before I started school. I did get a heavy dose of "Your Chance to Live" lessons, courtesy of the Defense Civil Preparedness Agency (formerly the Office of Civil Defense), during my middle school years. This lessons took the forms of films and filmstrips about a variety of disasters: earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados, floods and, yes, nuclear war, the existence of which made the whole series necessary. Curiously, I don't remember any of those lessons taking place once I started high school, which leads me to wonder if having them be such a large part of public school was just an Idaho thing. (My family moved to Oregon the summer before my freshman year.) Whatever the reason for exposing impressionable young students to so many ways we could all die, the result was probably not what the preparers of the curriculum intended. Being prepared didn't...

Students at a memorial service in Parkland, Florida If he hadn't had the gun, those seventeen people would still be alive. I can't say that truth will get lost in the pointless ritual that follows every school shooting. There are always commentators making this point, and plenty of people--the majority of Americans, in fact--who agree with it. And yet, I know that in the end, it will be ignored. How do I know this? Let's start with the responder-in-chief, the President of the United States, who, for once, spoke with measured, careful tones about what had happened at that Florida high school as an angry antisocial ex-student smuggled an assault rifle on campus and indiscriminately picked off students and teachers, then disappeared into the crowd of terrified fleeing teens. Trump didn't mention guns once in his speech. He's not alone: most politicians treat the truth at the heart of America's gun problem--that it involves guns--as a third rail. Fr...

America has a survey problem. That's actually too broad. American businesses have the problem, though it's American consumers who do the heavy lifting. Businesses are hooked on customer satisfaction surveys, but it's consumers who are asked, multiple times a day, to fill them out. Transactions, interactions, casual contacts, small purchases--it seems everyone who's selling something, or helping consumers feel better about having purchased that item, wants our opinion on how the contact with the salesperson or customer service representative went. Every time I call Kaiser Permanente to schedule an appointment, I'm asked to stay on the phone afterward to take a survey on how it went. Any purchase I make from the Amazon Marketplace results in a deluge of emails pleading with me to write a positive review of the item. Grocery store and restaurant receipts come with offers for extra fuel points or a free side in exchange for taking an online survey. It seems everybody ...

"What are your superpowers again?" "I'm rich." And that, my friends, is why we have an idiot in the White House insisting that he is "like, smart" on Twitter. But I digress before there's even been an ingress. This essay was inspired by a tweet straight from the thumbs of the Chief Twit, but it's framed by a movie I saw a week ago: "Justice League." That movie is every bit as awful as you may have heard from those superhero completists unfortunate enough to have subjected themselves to it, but it does contain some saving graces, one of which is the brilliant casting of The Flash with a twitchy nerdy fanboy who can't believe he gets to hang out with his heroes--and yes, that's a device that was ripped off in its entirety from the introduction of the new Spiderman as a twitchy nerdy fanboy who can't believe he gets to hang out with his heroes in both "Captain America: Civil War" and "Spiderman: Ho...

No, he can't really get away with murder. He just thinks he can. Nothing says "Trump" like impunity. The man blusters, blows, blabs as if he believes himself to be untouchable. With his entire regime under federal investigation, he regularly self-incriminates via the Twitter account his handlers have struggled in vain to regulate. By the reckoning of the  New York Times  he will, by the end of his first year in office, have told well over a hundred bald-faced lies , many of them repeatedly and with a clear effort to convince his most rabid followers of their veracity. In contrast, the  Times  found that, over the course of his entire Presidency, Barack Obama had told at most 16 falsehoods. Arriving at that number meant, in some cases, stretching the definition of falsehood to include exaggeration. On top of that, when notified he had been caught in a lie, Obama was quick to apologize and correct the error. Trump's response is to double down and insist all the ...

I rarely post memes, but this one grabbed me, and went straight to my Facebook feed: The issue addressed by the meme is a case before the Supreme Court: Jack Phillips, a Colorado baker and owner of Masterpiece Cakes, refused to bake a custom wedding cake for two men on the grounds that he was religiously opposed to gay marriage. Colorado has a non-discrimination law that applies to businesses, and the couple complained to the state's Civil Rights Division, which found Phillips to be in violation of the statute. Phillips has now appealed that decision to the highest level, and sometime in the next year, we will learn whether public businesses can discriminate against protected minorities by appealing to the First Amendment. The case is complicated by many factors, including the conflict it presents between the freedoms of expression and religion, and the right of state governments to offer a higher standard of protection to historically victimized minorities than that provid...

Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial, Washington, D.C. Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.  Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Jefferson trembled when he thought of slavery and remembered that God is just. Ere long all America will tremble. These words come from a sermon by Theodore Parker, a Unitarian Minister, Transcendentalist, and Abolitionist. They first saw print in a collection of sermons published in 1853, and, quoted by essayists, preachers, and politicians, were ultimately boiled down to this aphorism: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." In that form, the quote found its way into the sermons of many a pr...