At the table, eating at home, we usually take a minute or two to reflect on the days events and our good fortune, in the form of a simple doxology.
Several years ago, when my daughter was little, we had dinner with some of my friends, people without any religious affiliation. Before the meal commenced my little girl (who was about four years old) chirped “Aren’t we going to say grace?”
After a moment of awkwardness, my secular friends suggested that I do the honors. I managed to utter a non-religious expression of unfocused gratitude that I hoped would not offend. It sounded more like a bad socialist poem in honor of farm laborers.
So on this holiday, in the company of family and friends, let us reflect on the good fortune we enjoy, and the agro-industrial complex and the workers who have played a role in bringing our feast to table. And, because it couldn’t cause any harm, may this “prayer” drift upward in gratitude.
Yesterday my great aunt died. Her brain is being sent to a lab.
She was a Catholic nun of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, Boston Irish, and sharp as a tack into her 90s. She had a prayer for everyone each day. I remember her on a Maine beach, wearing a sun hat, and already impossibly old, but with a sparkle in her eye, watching my daughter play in the cold summer waves.
Why is she being studied by scientists? Because the rate of Alzheimer’s disease is so suspiciously lower among nuns that my great aunt was included in a multi-year study made by neurologists to try figure out the reason. This ‘Sister study’ was even featured on an ABC 20/20 news program a couple of years ago.
The nuns would explain this in terms of their relationship with God. There may be a scientific angle too; prayer, as a practice, does focus the mind. Or perhaps nuns, many of them educators, keep using their cognitive abilities long into old age.
Aside from all of that, it will be a bittersweet Thanksgiving. But the whole family will be together, and there might be a great Irish wake.
The Left is eviscerated. We live with one-party rule, where the only meaningful political struggles, in terms of legislation and policy, take place between moderate and ultraconservative Republicans.
I’m not passing a value judgment on any of this. In fact I think it’s bad for democracy. It means we’re contending with turf wars between congressional strongmen and their affiliate bureaucracies.
Democrats need to rebuild. They tried their best with traditional constituents this past cycle, and couldn’t make it work. Some still insist that “it’s the cities, stupid”. But they only appeal to anger and condescension. Politicians who are intuitively disdainful of capitalism, and are reflexively dovish on foreign policy, they can’t fake their way into capturing a majority.
Look to centrists, reformers, pro-business politicians who don’t pin their success on the country’s impending failure. Consider the work being done by various think tanks who are soberly sorting through the electoral numbers to gain insight into our country.
The United States needs fruitful dialogue between political parties which may vigorously disagree, but which both have something to offer the electorate.
This article in today’s NY Times discusses ‘The Incredibles’ and the educational trend towards rewarding mediocrity. In many schools the harsher consequences of competition are nullified by the “everybody-gets-a-medal” philosophy.
No reasonable person wants to subject little children to win-or-lose realities during the years they need nurturing and positive reinforcement. But by the time grammar school wears on, kids need the experiences of both triumph and defeat in sports, academics, and their social lives.
This is not because we want to raise brutal and greedy little capitalists. It’s because we want kids to develop the emotional wherewithal to rebound and recover, to keep growing right though the bumps and knocks that go with living. (If you want to witness a tantrum, be there when Overprotected Johnny, who has been told his whole life he is “special”, gets handed his first F in a high-school class, or a resounding loss on the playing field.)
Email me with comments, and I may add them to this post.
Take dead aim on the rich boys. Get them in the crosshairs, and take them down. Just remember, they can buy anything, but they can’t buy backbone. Don’t let them forget it.
That’s Bill Murray’s character in Rushmore, one of my favorite movies. He’s giving advice, with his usual deadpan delivery, to the not-rich kids who are lucky enough to attend a good prep school. It’s the American idea going back further than Gatsby, and it’s something Europeans can never comprehend.
It also resonates with the changes taking place in today’s media, as the centers of power become subverted by the blogosphere. No one has a permanent lock on wealth or information in this society, because democracy and the free market are systems that (usually, eventually) redistribute those things to the honest and hardworking.
Bloggers can proudly trace this heritage back to Thomas Paine. And the bastions of legacy, mainstream media shouldn’t forget it.