Joe was of a questionable character.  No one was sure who his father really was.  He ran away from home when he was 12.  He was a loner.  He brought alcohol to the parties and hung out with prostitutes.  He was a blue-collar worker when he was employed, which wasn’t constant, and at other times lived on handouts.

He criticized religious leaders for taking advantage of their members, and let his anger out on these people to the point of physically damaging their property.  He started a gang of men who roamed the territory with him, condemning the powerful and wealthy.  He would have been called a socialist if the media knew about him, because he kept saying those who had should give to those who did not have, including prison inmates.

It should not come as a surprise, then, that eventually Joe was arrested and put on trial.  He wasn’t a citizen, and the road to the death penalty was easy.  The religious leaders cheered at the death of this traitor.

Joe, is of course, Jesus.  In the recent GOP debate, there was a noticeable celebration of Rick Perry’s declaration that the death penalty was ultimate justice.  Perry tries to succor Christian extremists (not all Christians are extreme) and proudly defends authorizing the death of 234 people in the state of Texas.

There doesn’t seem to be any cognitive dissonance for certain Christians to celebrate the death penalty, despite the fact that the hero of the Christian faith was not only executed, but you could also argue that he was wrongfully convicted, as is argued about many of today’s death row inmates.

I myself am generally opposed to the death penalty for a lot of practical reasons, but I’ll admit that I certainly would be the first to pull the trigger if someone hurt my kid.  Yet, that’s also why we have the law, to keep up from pulling the trigger, to find out who is really guilty, and what the circumstance were.  For those Christians who do support the death penalty, there should at least be a sense of somber necessity, not a sense of righteousness vs. the guilty.  After all, the Jesus that was executed by the state is also said by many Christians to have experienced that in the place of others.  But can those Christians take that belief, that Christ died the necessary execution, at face value?  Do they believe it?  Or do they really believe he died for the innocent?  In which case, why did he need to die?

My current low-level administrative position has more knowledge and skill-related requirements than that. While there is certainly something attractively democratic about the idea that almost anyone can run for office, it’s not good for America. The issue of evolution is a case in point, and not a trivial one.

According to a 2009 Gallup poll only 39% of Americans support evolutionary theory while 25% opposite it and 36% simply don’t take sides. Unsurprisingly, accepting evolutionary theory correlates with level of education and with church attendance (the latter is shame, because opposing evolution is bad theology, not just bad science). Rick Perry’s recent statement that Texas teaches creationism illustrates yet again that opposing evolution is viewed as a great way to coddle voters in the attempt to become President of the United States. It also illustrates his lack of knowledge about his own state, which does not teach creationism as a part of the standard curriculum, although undoubtedly it happens in some classrooms anyway (12% of classrooms across American, according to this study) .

According to the most recent U.S. DOE National Assesment of Education Progress in Science, less than half of American students reached the level of proficiency.  A paltry 1% of fourth-graders, 2% of eigth-graders, and 1% of twelfth-graders performed at the advanced level. The DOE Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (2007; a 2011 study was just performed, results are not out), American 8th-graders lag behind 9 other countries, and are roughly equal to four others.

Providing a high-quality science education for American students should be a priority. We need it to be competitive in the world market, to churn out citizens who innovate and create – and thus, bring in jobs and money and a competitive global economy. Those who are opposed to evolution may have the right to that erroneous belief, but they should not have the right to derail public education and the future of America.

We simply cannot afford politicians who ignore and oppose accepted science. I don’t know how to solve this problem, when the constitutional requirements for politicians are at such a low bar. While I believe everyone should have a vote, regardless of beliefs, I do not think everyone should have the right to run the country. At the very least I think there should be a civil service exam for anyone who wants to run, showing they understand the basics of the government. And if I could wave my magic wand, we’d create a job description and list of required knowledge and skills. We’d treat the jobs of Representative, Senator and President like we are employers with performance expectations that must be met.

My ex-husband and I finalized our divorce about two months ago, and he gets remarried in October. There are already a lot of issues around marriage for my son, and yet he is also being exposed to the idea of marriage as a wedding, as a fun and perhaps inevitable ceremony he should participate in. And there’s a lot implied, even in a fun little kid’s activity, about what marriage looks like on the outside.

This raises something I have thought about for awhile, concerning what to teach my son about relationships. In America, there is certainly a strong current that suggests that marriage is a life-long monogamous relationship between one man and one woman, and other variations are failures, or abominations, or just not quite right. That view is changing, but only very slowly.

The function and definition of relationships and marriage have changed greatly in human history (even just since recorded history), and have varied by culture. Americans of the Judeo-Christian tradition ought to know that the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible was filled with polygamy – and nary a divine slap on the wrist, because marriage had a lot to do with being certain of your property (including women) and your lineage, and also making sure everyone was under someone’s umbrella of care. The New Testament stars single celibate men.

The idealized notion of courtly love in medieval Europe was based on the assumption that emotional and spiritual fulfillment would not be found in the marriage. Marriage still functioned as a guarantor of property and lineage, of political relationships, and more, but if you wanted happiness, find it elsewhere. This is not to say that no one ever loved their spouse, but that concomitant with any ideal has always been a very pragmatic reality.

Today, in much of America, there has been a hope that these things can be combined – that you can find your soulmate, make a public declaration, and keep things going for as many as 6 or 7 decades after that (many of our predecessors had a much short lifespan in which to love/suffer each other). But the reality is that with or without a marriage certificate, people usually experience a number of lengthy relationships in their life. Many of these are in serial order, but it’s all too clear that many occur simultaneously and that this is not new to our species. It’s also clear that the state definitely treats marriage as a property and custody issue. It’s very easy and quick to get married, very difficult and expensive to get out.

Now there is always the question of relationships that produce children. What’s best for the children? The problem is, you can never really know because no family is the same. The true control group would be to test a child’s life history against his or her alternate life history.

Ideal notions about relationships are dangerous, because they will not be realized by most people, leading to feelings of failure, anger, hurt, depression, compounded by external judgment from those who believe the ideal is a standard.  I certainly want my child to have a real, not phony, view of matrimony.

So here is my Relationship Un-Manifesto:

• Relationships are difficult because they involve people. People who are always still growing up and changing, are damaged in unique ways, and have very different expectations and communication styles. There is no standard person, so there can be no standard relationship.

• More than once you will probably be in a relationship with a person who has good qualities. That isn’t enough to sustain a relationship long-term.

• The best you can do in any situation is respect yourself and the other person involved. Respect doesn’t necessitate a particular outcome.

• There are worse things than being alone. Figure out how to be a companion to yourself as much as possible, knowing loneliness is a part of life for everyone.

• There’s no way to avoid pain and heartbreak, whether in a relationship or leaving one.

• Guiding principle: whatever works for the people involved. There’s not much more that can really be demanded – and yet “whatever works” is also a difficult journey and target.

I’ve never written a blog post dedicated to complaining about a company or product. Circumstances, however, force me to seek alternative routes to get the attention of a human at one particular organization. Any human will do. Yes, Yahoo, I am talking to you.

I lost access to my yahoo account weeks ago. I don’t know if I had some kind of brain zap and lost the memory of both my password and security answer, or whether my account has been compromised. But weeks ago I began with the tips posted on recovering account information. I no longer have access to the alternate email address I provided when I signed up with Yahoo a decade ago. When none of the tips proved helpful, I filled out the contact form online and provided a new alternate email. I couldn’t find any phone numbers listed to make an old-fashioned phone call.

I received an autoresponse, directing me to the aforementioned tips, and adding that if that didn’t help I should response to the Yahoo email. I responded. I have now sent 8 emails in the past few weeks and have yet to get a response of any kind.

I finally located phone numbers for the Yahoo customer service, by – wait for it – googling it. I called several times and each time the automated voice said that I was being transferred to a customer care agent, the line cut off.

I started Tweeting to Yahoo Customer Care. After several tweets I finally got a tweet back directing me to send them a direct message through Twitter. I tweeted a reminder to the social media geniuses that you can’t send a direct message to someone unless they are following you.

So, Yahoo now follows me on Twitter. I sent the direct message, and was told that a service agent would contact me through the alternate email (the one I already used 8 times). I tweeted them a reminder about that history and asked them to make sure a real human contacted me. The result? Another auto-response was emailed to my account. I wrote my 9th email in response.

This isn’t just a matter of personal emails. I have financial and legal documents attached to emails in my yahoo account. Yahoo has now convinced me to complete my transfer to Gmail. Neverthless, I still need my property back. If you know anyone at yahoo, please send them this blog so I can recover my account. My confidence in their product, their technical services, and their customer care is blown to bits. But I still need my documents and contacts before leaving their disastrous company well behind me.

He writes:

“In the past, we collected information not simply to know things. That was only the beginning. We also collected information to convert it into something larger than facts and ultimately more useful — into ideas that made sense of the information. We sought not just to apprehend the world but to truly comprehend it, which is the primary function of ideas.”

Now, however:

“It is certainly no accident that the post-idea world has sprung up alongside the social networking world. Even though there are sites and blogs dedicated to ideas, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Flickr, etc., the most popular sites on the Web, are basically information exchanges, designed to feed the insatiable information hunger, though this is hardly the kind of information that generates ideas. It is largely useless except insofar as it makes the possessor of the information feel, well, informed.”

In fact, he goes so far as to say that tweeting is “anti-thinking.”  This isn’t the first op-ed I’ve read about the evils of social media (and certainly not the first I’ve read in the NY Times, interestingly) – it reportedly destroys real relationships in favor of short, superficial ones, allows us to embrace our supposedly postmodern desire to be ignorant, and contributes to our ever-shrinking attention spans.

The problems with these op-eds are similar.

1) The problem of the Golden Age:  First, there never was a Golden Age of humans being informed and analaytical beings with strong positive social relationships.  Whenever an article features a Golden Age argument, you can be sure the author is arguing against a foil.  Throughout most of history, and still in many parts of the world today, education and access to scholarly news has been restricted to those with money and access.  Social relationships were often characterized by race, gender, and class hatred, and plain old abuse and meanness.  I have yet to see any op-eds against social media citing research illustrating that social media is truly bad for humanity.  It changes things, but change itself doesn’t prove much. One cover title from the Atlantic Monthly certainly doesn’t count as anything more than very loose circumstantial evidence.

2) Reason and Religion: Gabler laments the end of the Enlightenment in favor of religious dogma, superstition, etc – but its precisely Enlightenment thinking that turned the Bible, in America, into a book of literal data compared to a more nuanced view by previous theologians.  The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves (Shakespeare, Julius Caesar.  You can google it and read the whole book, unlike the people who lived during Shakespeare’s time).  We pride ourselves on our rationality but the truth is rationality is flexible and vulnerable.  It can be trained to work in various ways, and people can reason to absolutely wrong and/or unethical conclusions.   We can be trained to have warped or stunted rationality. Enlightenment emphasis on data and observation has led to some pretty negative consequences in terms of American religion.  And so also social media can be used to promote human rights or xenophobia.

3) Twittering away attention spans? Does the brevity of Twitter and some other social media applications generate shorter attention spans?  Again, I’d like to see evidence.  I’d also like to see evidence that as a culture, or even species we ever had greater attention spans than what we have today.  The fact that some people in history memorized entire books says as much to my mind about the lack of available books than it does about the culture valuation of attention.  Moreover, some studies have shown that social media apps in the workplace contribute to productivity, because the multi-tasking brain stays active and people are juiced by some enjoyable breaks.

The real issue, to my mind, in enhancing analytical behavior and demand for good ideas is the educational system.  We have to be trained to think in a number of ways – to absorb information, to produce new and creative ideas, and to communicate those well.  If I were a teacher, I would use Twitter as a way to teach people to state a thesis, and use online education technologies to enhance the learning experience outside the classroom.  While some people are fortunate enough to have good teachers, we don’t as a society value it enough to redo the system and make teaching a high-value, high-powered career.

But in the meantime, we can at least have our horizons expanded by new ideas from around the world.  And we use our social networks (like Facebook, where I was alerted to this NY Times article) to get opinions from our trusted friends and acquaintances on topics ranging from economics to astrophysics – and yes, what Kate Middleton wore today.  I can read about her online and then turn to an article about the new space-time invisbility cloak.  Frankly, I feel pretty lucky.

My brother took me to see Rent, his favorite musical.  It was great, of course.  I’ve rarely seen such spot-on performances, and I spent a good deal of time with my throat in knots and thankful that the house lights weren’t up.  But there were two themes which haunt me.  The first is the embracement of poverty for passion.  The second is – everyone just wants love, even if we do our best to run from it or destroy it.

Amongst a few characters, there’s the sense that you should embrace poverty for art’s sake.  You don’t even need to worry about paying last year’s rent, and anyone who would ask you to do so is clearly an empathizer with The Man.  The character of Mark struck me in particular.  He wanted to create films, and lived poorly to do so.  In the second act he briefly held a commercial tv position before deciding that he had sold out and should quite to pursue his dreams.

I wanted to pat the character on the head and say, “Poverty will find you soon enough, don’t go looking for it.”  And it was also the moment my head lifted out of the storyline – if you can criticize yourself or others for “selling out,” you clearly don’t know what real poverty feels like.  Real poverty doesn’t have time for creativity.  Real poverty is too tired for it.  Real poverty feels like s***.  You can’t doodle a stick figure in real poverty.  Paying your rent doesn’t mean you sold out, it means you paid for a roof.

I don’t begrudge the play or the character that feeling or character because its very appropriate to the la Boheme/youthful Emo artist storyline.  But it did make me feel very much like a 34-year-old single mother.  It made me feel tired.  I remember idealism.  And I’m still a liberal.  I’m just a tired liberal who is more interested in getting stuff taken care of than living or dying for ideas.  Ideas can’t die for us, and we die for them routinely.

The second theme – we all just want love.  And we are also terrified of it.  And we are damaged, and we are afraid.  And we are damn lucky if it shines remotely near us.  In the musical, a very fragile group of people were joined together by a person named Angel, who shined a very tenuous light of love through the group.  At least, until he died.  And the group had to figure out anew how to find enough to stay together and, literally, to stay alive.

It’s just a musical.  But watching it, you know- you know you are opening an old wound that may never be healed.   A wound you sort of inherited by virtue of being human.  You are surrounded by tons of people but rarely feel at home.  You were betrayed by someone you trusted.  Or they died.  Or you’ve never met someone who saw you as you, only met people who saw what they wanted from you. Or you are afraid that being rejected means utter annihilation.  We live in a crowd, but we are utterly alone.  There are 8 billion people in the world, and I suspect 99% feel alone most of the time.

If we are lucky, we pay the rent.  If we find love, we are beyond blessed.

Apparently “The Butcher of Brooklyn” is pleading guilty by reason of insanity.  Which seems weird to me.  Surely you have to be insane to do something that hideous, so how you can to be not guilty of a terrible crime by virtue of having done it?  Supposedly there’s something about knowing whether what you did was right or wrong but what does it matter if a child is dead?

But the news keeps pouring in.  An 8-year-old hung by the Taliban – not one crazy person, but several people together – because his dad, a cop, refused to hand the police car over to them.

In Norway, a man carefully planned to attack a Youth Camp, impersonate a police officer, and shoot as many as he could.

I’d like to think that the people who kill children are aberrations.  Surely they are one-off from the rest of us.  They are an unfortunate exception to all that makes us human.

But the scariest truth of all is that that kind of horror is all too human.  Children are murdered in war, recruited as soldiers in war, hit by their parents, hit by their older siblings, molested by their teachers or priests.

There is nothing in being human that guarantees the protection of children.

Can we plead not guilty by reason of insanity?

To which Judge shall we plead our case?  Who is qualified to judge?

Evolution doesn’t care if we’re crazier than f***, as long as we reproduce in greater numbers than we die.

God?  Shall we appeal to the God who allowed such things?  Is any God less guilty than we are?  (I dare you to respond to this post with a response about how God had to watch HIS only son die, and therefore can relate to all other (non-omnipotent parents) who have to suffer the loss of their kids? Or to talk with reverence about the Book of Job.  Or to respond about how traditional attributes aren’t quite right, and the Whiteheadian God had to empty Godself to create the universe and therefore can’t intervene.  Go ahead, I DARE YOU.)

It’s very difficult to be the parent of a child and to know that you live in universe where the only protection children have is that just enough people got together and successfully protected them.  And that you’re child is one of the lucky ones. So far.

I’ve written at other times about things like the UN declaration of rights pertaining to women and children, etc.  But such idealistic gestures only go hand in hand with the reality that human nature itself is not destined for such an end.  The world is only ever what we make of it.

What we need is mob rule.  Mob rule in favor of protecting the helpess. The powerless.  Our children.

MC Yogi – Give Love (Giving4Living Mix) from MC Yogi on Vimeo.

This song is a new family favorite.  I heard it on a family yoga video I ordered to try with my son.  I expected him to do it with me once and then tell me it was boring, but he loved it.  I am constantly reminded that being jaded isn’t something kids are born with – they don’t have preconceptions about school, or what’s cool.  Over time they start to hear it from older kids, siblings, television, or their parents.  But until then, they approach a new thing open to liking it.  It’s very refreshing.  I find myself starting to censor kid’s books that start with phrases like “I hate school” or “I hate homework” or “I hate my sister.”  (Also, I am frustrated that books marketed to boys often feature poop, underpants, farts or other stinky things.  Boys get the reverse of the Disney Princess phenomena).  My kid likes Beyblades, and Batman, and Johnny Test – and he likes yoga songs, and firmly believes “love is the most important thing,” and that school is fun.  Don’t you dare tell him otherwise.

Actually, the beauty of Star Trek has always been that the creators, writers, and producers know that the show – the final frontier – is about exploring human nature.  The Romans, Vulcans, and Klingons all represented particular facets of human experience held up to the light for close scrutiny.  And as the real-life astronauts know, experiencing the vastness of space, and seeing the earth from space, is an incredibly humanizing experience.  In 1948 Sir Fred Hoyle predicted that “Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from the outside, is available, a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.”

The American space shuttle program has come to an end.  That doesn’t mean NASA is turning out the lights (there seems to be some misunderstanding about that), but we are closing an incredible chapter in American history and opening a new one.  Watch our beginnings, politically speaking, at least (the speech is lengthy, and well-worth watching):

What’s next then?

An interesting difference between the first and second videos is that the second talks about international cooperation and various kinds of partnerships. I suspect that once you are in the “space community” as one woman said, you see things differently. In the words of former astronauts:

Alan Shepard:

“If somebody’d said before the flight, “Are you going to get carried away looking at the earth from the moon?” I would have say, “No, no way.” But yet when I first looked back at the earth, standing on the moon, I cried.”

Ulf Merbold:

“For the first time in my life I saw the horizon as a curved line. It was accentuated by a thin seam of dark blue light—our atmosphere. Obviously this was not the ocean of air I had been told it was so many times in my life. I was terrified by its fragile appearance.”

Jim Lovell, of Apollo 8 and 13, said this:

“We learned a lot about the Moon, but what we really learned was about the Earth. The fact that just from the distance of the Moon you can put your thumb up and you can hide the Earth behind your thumb. Everything that you’ve ever known, your loved ones, your business, the problems of the Earth itself—all behind your thumb. And how insignificant we really all are, but then how fortunate we are to have this body and to be able to enjoy loving here amongst the beauty of the Earth itself.”

Mike Collins, of Apollo 11:

“Oddly enough the overriding sensation I got looking at the earth was, my god that little thing is so fragile out there.”

Wlly Schirra;

“I left Earth three times and found no other place to go. Please take care of Spaceship Earth.”

Aleksandr Alexsandrov:

“We were flying over America and suddenly I saw snow, the first snow we ever saw from orbit. I have never visited America, but I imagined that the arrival of autumn and winter is the same there as in other places, and the process of getting ready for them is the same. And then it struck me that we are all children of our Earth.”

Donald Williams:

“For those who have seen the Earth from space, and for the hundreds and perhaps thousands more who will, the experience most certainly changes your perspective. The things that we share in our world are far more valuable than those which divide us.”

Michael Collins:

“I really believe that if the political leaders of the world could see their planet from a distance of 100,000 miles their outlook could be fundamentally changed. That all-important border would be invisible, that noisy argument silenced. The tiny globe would continue to turn, serenely ignoring its subdivisions, presenting a unified façade that would cry out for unified understanding, for homogeneous treatment. The earth must become as it appears: blue and white, not capitalist or Communist; blue and white, not rich or poor; blue and white, not envious or envied.”

Edgar Mitchell:

“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, “Look at that, you son of a bitch.”

“We went to the Moon as technicians; we returned as humanitarians.”

Sultan bin Salman Al-Saud

“The first day or so we all pointed to our countries. The third or fourth day we were pointing to our continents. By the fifth day, we were aware of only one Earth.”

William Anders:

“We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the earth.”

(Thanks to www.spacequotations.com for the great quotes)

I started this blog while working a temp job at which I had a lot of time on my hands, and wrote about various things I was reading.  I deliberately avoided being overly personal, except for on one occasion, and I deleted the post within 24 hours.  As I start up again, talking to myself in the virtual void, I am going to try to be more personal while commenting on all the usual things that grab my attention.  Why?  The one thing I have learned in the last few years is that life is short and unpredictable.  There is no point in being anything other than myself, because there are no guarantees in life, there is nothing else that will definitely be here tomorrow, not even the things and people you love most.

I am one of the lucky ones.  I am emerging from difficult years with the constant support of a few close friends and family, especially my brother with whom I live, and who is not only a great brother but an exceptional uncle.  He walks my child to school everyday and is not ashamed to participate in dancing along with a parakeet in our living room.

So I start again.  I know less and possess less than I did before, but that’s what happens when you survive.  So I’m lucky.