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A great card I got at the RISD museum design store in Providence, RI.

By grain.

Study Failure

To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure

by Henry Petroski (Harvard, 2012, xii + 410pp)

A great new book, fascinating both for its content as well as a philosophical reflection on cause and effect, the attribution of blame, ideas of progress, and human - object relationships.

"Accidents may occur quickly, but they often follow long periods of normal or near-normal behavior... [and] no matter how devastating a failure, its consequences can be even greater if its lessons are not learned and heeded...  Especially when we become involved in groups and teams, the moral compass of the individual can be deflected by the mettle of the masses" (5 ,23-4). 

Wonderfully, clearly written with smart, gripping and ever-intriguing stories.

Get a copy.  You'll be glad you did.

Bonded Bodies

Inside any of the reality-warping bubbles that contain places like Park Slope, Brooklyn, Princeton, NJ, Palo Alto, CA -- or, just so we don't think they all begin with Ps -- Beacon Hill, Boston, MA, and Highland Park in Dallas, TX, you'll see this on a daily basis:

A tall, beautiful, younger mother with long hair and a hefty diamond ring on her finger, perhaps some other understated though conspicuously expensive jewelry.

She'll be wearing Lululemon tights to accentuate her slim figure.  

(Amazingly, for a product that's otherwise hard to differentiate, LuLu has been beyond brilliant in setting the twenty-first-century standard for things Spandex -- a term of derision and disdain back in the big and baggy 80s and 90s! They have enough of a devoted following to seek protection as a religious institution.)

The top doesn't matter all that much.  Maybe a t-shirt from an Ivy League school, or better yet, a towny prep school like Deerfield or Sidwell Friends.  

Then you'll notice her eight or ten year old daughter.  Exactly the same.  Maybe a few feet shorter (mom's tend to average 5'8"+).

Standing in line behind one such couple at a Starbucks yesterday, I had this disturbing realization that the mother and daughter had the same size calves. Now I didn't measure, but eyeballing it they looked very close. Mom did expand slightly more in the thighs and waist, but this particular woman was trending more toward anorexic than athletic.

I felt sad.  I felt outraged.  All in all, just mystified.

Here's my reflection on patriarchy and misogyny for today:

Women learn that to be beautiful and desirable they must maintain a (newly liberated feminist) body molded in the image of a Lolita-like prepubescent beauty.  (Even if Nabokov describes Lolita as being rather gangly and unattractive, no matter—that book foretells the future more than most.)

Slim hips, flat tummy, lithe arms, the fairly normal ten or twelve year old female.  Stay that way!

So as puberty takes over, and our bodies begin to change, women must combat that change to maintain their ideal body type.  No extra fat, nothing.  Just taller.

Girls learn to hate their sex.  The hormones, the urges, the desires—all to be repressed as part of this evil force stealing the body on which their future recognition depends.

It's tragic.  Eve-like shame.

Boys, on the other hand, welcome puberty with wide-open arms.  Bigger, thicker, stronger -- muscles to develop, voices to deepen, abs to harden.  Every moment is a gift for becoming more manly -- and finding yet another woman to idealize and objectify in the model of the young women they idealized at the moment of their sexual awakening.

Why?

I don't know.  I'm curious to know women's perspectives.  Is it the same for gay women?

I just hope we can all have fit, healthy bodies and enjoy them safely, responsibly and consensually without such terrible burdens of shame and self-denying self hatred.

Bienvenidos a los estados unidos

Have the Republicans suddenly started to get a smaller dose of stupid juice each morning?  Could it be that they've decided not to continue self-destructing as a national political party? 

¿o es el GOP la fiesta vieja y gorda?

I often remind folks that, geographically speaking, the majority of the United States han hablado en español desde el siglo 16.

(o... los esclavos...)

Nuevo Mexico, anyone?  It's a state!

If we're so worried about our English roots, we should remember that at the time of the Revolution, the thirteen colonies had more non-Britons than ever before.  And our founders: most spoke, or at least read and wrote a number of languages, from Greek to French.

We might have bought the Louisiana Purchase from France, but they had just gotten it from Spain...

....oh yes, we're talking about citizenship, not paranoia about an invasion of murderous Mexicans speaking Spanish as a means to exploit us and charge too much to cut the grass, clean the dishes and watch the kids.

Thanks for the profiling, John McCain: "we have been too content for too long to allow individuals to mow our lawn, serve our food, clean our homes, and even watch our children while not affording them any of the benefits that make our country so great."

Todos tienen que aprender español al mismo tiempo que aprenden inglés.  

Vivimos en un país bilingüe.

God calling. Is anyone there?

Regardless of your faith or feeling about Christianity, it's kind of a big deal.

I'm forever astounded by how little the average person knows about the Bible -- from the basic narrative of creation to key concepts and phrases: original sin, the Tower of Babble, dietary restrictions, "In the beginning was the word..."

In order to teach about the Puritans, I sketched this cartoon that runs roughly from Creation to the Present according to Genesis and secular history.

Hopefully it might be of use to you or for your teaching.

Weight of a New Class

Toward the end of August a few years back, a good friend remarked to me: you're not missing much here in Princeton, though the campus is looking more master-race-like than ever.

We both chuckled.  The athletes were back.

Tall and fit, often blond and beautiful, broad shouldered and flat tummied—these were the people that looked as good and were as poised after a three mile run, sweaty in the Jersey humidity, as they were chatting with friends in seersucker or a slinky summer dress while sipping a gin and tonic.

Though we had such high expectations—they carried the weight of the world.  They had to beat Harvard and Yale.  

Soon it would be Goldman Sachs or Teach for America—any highly competitive program for the ultra-ambitious.  

The world must be won—changed—made ours—for better or worse. 

(WSJ: New Research Suggests Extra Pounds, Large Waists Undermine Perceptions of Leadership Ability)

So I felt less bad if I could only manage a four pack against their perfectly toned six—behind the curve like every wayward graduated student.

Each year a new class entered and whether on a team or not, they had "leadership" experience, had been active in high school, possessed some strategic thinking skills, must have been liked well enough—or feared, Mean Girls style—such that they gained distinguished recommendations over their peers.

More than SAT scores or backpacks full of books, these IVY admits embody their admission.  By and large, they're a good looking bunch.  Such visually appealing characteristics have helped them get ahead in innumerable ways—part of The Beauty Bias, as Stanford Law Professor Deborah L. Rhode has argued. 

Just do some compare and contrast.  Visit a community college campus or even a big state university.  They have fat people.  Ugly people.  The vast cross-section of our great democratic humanity.

Then try Yale or Dartmouth or Amherst or Williams. Quite a slimmer upper crust crowd. And at those places, if you do spot a chubbier one, I bet you'll find a very strong inverse correlation between pounds on the body and dollars in the family's bank account.

Where do they come from?  Try Andover, Exeter, Hotchkiss, Lawrenceville... one needn't look far. They have an early start.

So yes.  We can all find our many healthy weights. But rotundity may well have replaced religion as the opiate of the masses. In our class-based capitalist world, skinny = success and fat = failure. Personal, ethical, professional, moral, spiritual, you name it.  

Read the websites of a few women's magazines: 

Self (Emmy Rossum's Stay-Fit Secrets) or Cosmo (Tone Up: Sneaky Ways to Burn Calories) or Seventeen (New Stuff: 17FitClub Video!)

OMG.

Guys: for more tips on less tummy: Men's Health: 5 New Moves to Reveal Your Abs.

Fitness / Sex: The Muscles Women Love

(And all this time I thought I was trying to reveal my true, kind, emotional self...)

Not to say this is good or healthy or anything like that.  Not at all.  But it's true.  

So lets at least weigh our arguments more truthfully and rather than avoiding the issue, put a thumb on the scale so that the privilege of looking good doesn't limit the opportunities of those less worthy of cover-model conquests. 

In a future post we wcan fix the hollow calorie crisis amongst the poor, and add truly useful physical education programs to our nation's schools.  

Emotional Fidelity

Disclaimer: I really, really dislike the whole “men are from mars” shtick. 

But gender and gendered difference fascinate me.

In my Forbidden Fictions classes, I’ve often posed the question “can you cheat on someone without ever touching another person physically or even taking off a piece of clothing?”

I wanted to explore the many dimensions of liberty of conscience, something that John Milton pioneered in his seventeenth-century Areopagitica (sound smarter: air-e-o-pa-jit-ih-ka).  Today, Stanley Fish and Martha Nussbaum each explore this concept in their own ways.

So while watching Woody Allen’s Match Point or reading Lolita, I wondered: does checking someone out or having a movie-star crush – do these everyday and seemingly inescapable acts constitute cheating? 

Not full-out affairs, passion-filled and emotionally robust pursuits while otherwise in a supposedly committed relationship—but mini-cheats, undisclosed gaps in an imagined vision of shared and universal, sacramental love?

A conversation recently turned toward this question and a female interlocutor’s response took me by surprise:

The reason women don’t care too much if their boyfriend or husband goes to a strip club or gets a blowjob, she said, or even hooks up with someone—that’s just physical lust.  We know that no one can sleep with one person for the rest of her or his life without going crazy.  It’s emotional cheating that drives us insane—sharing love or close feelings with someone else, telling then secrets that aren’t disclosed in the relationship.

Now, I don’t know if we men have a primordially hard-wired need to spread our seed far and wide. 

For me, the more interesting distinction dealt with the difference between the physical and the emotional – the differently honed-in-upon aspects of the intimate.

My mind, manlier than I’ve realized, always imagined a sexualized path toward infidelity.  Maybe my inner feminist never questioned having incredible friends with whom I share the most essential aspects of my self. 

Without parents or a close family, my friends know more than anyone else.   Some of my closest friends are women, perhaps in part because they’re the most emotionally self-aware, kind and supportive people I know (like a couple of my guy friends, too).

I just took for granted that their company was as normal as a woman talking with her closest girlfriends about everything, even and especially the things they would never tell family members.  Do women do that with male friends, too?  People in non-heterosexual or multi-parnter relationships?

I hope we can all learn and understand and find ways to expand the complexities of trust and love, and to continue to learn (and sometimes undo) the sometimes planetary distances of gender that can separate us.

Words of the prophets are written on subway walls...

Shoeshine genius: "You gonna be dead a hell a lot longa than yous be 'live so you gotta balance this shit out and have some fun."

Powerful. Heartbreaking. Necessary.

Children killed in New York City.

Thank you, @WNYC.

Thank you, @HOSAGV.

Lance. Plough shares into swords, pills into pedals and vice versa

Smart perspective from the London Review of Books.

An ethical lesson to teach.  Messy, contradictory.  More about us than this egotistical narcissist.  LiveStrong?  We wanted to win and win and win.  Better or worse that chewing up and spitting out Michael Jackson?  They remind me of one another.

Hairless.  The Judge in @CormacMcCarthys Blood Meridian?

A writer politician

My First Coup d'Etat, by John Dramani Mahama, sitting Vice President of Ghana.

The best non-fiction book I've read in the last year -- since Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers -- and one of my favorites of all time, for the moment.

Check out this reading.

First Amendment. It comes first.

Let's focus on the first Amendment for the new year, before we worry ourselves to death about the second.

A journalistic hero passes.

Good guys with guns -- at schools?

An important article from my good friend Dan Denvir:

Silent but deadly...

Shame, shit or get off…

Somewhere around three or four or five years old, we start to figure out that we shouldn't be naked, and that it's embarrassing to be naked—even when we're alone.  

Adults are never naked, so why should I be naked?  Everyone avoids it so anxiously, there has to be something very, very wrong or scary or broken about being naked.

But for a few years we have an edenic innocence.  We scamper in our birthday suits when we hear grandma pulling into the driveway, or wander unrestrained from the bathroom into a dinner party, much to the terror of our babysitter.

Then it's gone.  Never again.

Unless your mind and body degrades back into the mental space of early childhood—which is to say, you enter the later stages of Alzheimer's.

The disease, you quickly realize, has little to do with memory loss.  Or, more precisely, Alzheimer's leaves you forgetting not just memories—names and faces, pasts and places—but how to be.  

How do you speak?  How do you eat, sleep or breath?  Your brain thinks of these things for you.  But when it starts to die, bit by bit, you slip up on these cracks in your being.  All of a sudden you stare at the toilet, unsure of what to do, while going to the bathroom in your pants.

Will you die as a woman or a man or will it matter?

These big questions have big, nuanced and complex, unresolved philosophical, social and psychological answers.  They also have very simple and clear answers, too.

When we're afraid of something, we often try to hide it.  If you spill something on your shirt and the stain won't come out, what's the first thing you do?  Get a scarf, a sweater, anything—cover it up.

That's harder for you to do when you're splayed out on the ground but don't even know whether you're standing or sitting or concussively and convulsively screaming for help.

I have a very clear memory of trying to coax my mother into the bathroom at her nursing home.  Even with the door ajar, my standing with my back to her, every time she got close to the toilet she would start crying or yelling and accordingly sit on the floor or come charging at me.  What did do I deserve this?  she would scream.  Or something like it How could you? Why? Not me? Go away! all mixed together.

Just like a little child on the potty she needed me to hold her hand.  That would work.  Sometimes.

She could be naked, she could flirt with the janitor, with me, with the nurse, the doctor, her cat—it didn't matter much.

But pooping.  

That was too much.

Why?

We're all afraid of a mess.  And at some point, we realize our own crap smells, but we can deal with it in order to get the job done.  Light a candle.  Fabreeze.  Or enjoy the stink.

But when you forget what our own feces smells like?  And this horrendous, nasty, vomitus stuff just comes out of you, when people unappologetically demand that you keep making it and pushing it out of yourself?

What do you do?  What can you do?  

Not even God thought of such torture when he told Adam and Eve of their shame.

Holy shit.

Death as a woman or a man or will it matter?

We shit our way into this world, and we shit our way out.

A year after watching my mother die from Alzheimer’s disease—the anger, the sadness, the guilty pleasure of the word after, of measuring time since, of my own power to break the world into then and now—this is the best I can do by way of a conclusion.

Crass, yes.  But the sort of honesty I believe a mother deserves from her son.

The strength we apportion to teachers, especially parents, disappears completely in this beginning- and end-of-life helplessness.  We learn so much in weakness.  

It’s no surprise then, that we spend so much time trying to avoid it.

Who wants to be born, and who wants to die?  Choice enters little.  

Vulnerability means need and in the receipt of help no reckoning can segregate from good will the self interest and righteousness and masked insecurity that everyone contributes to charity.  Clarity of this kind comes only with the true inability to say no.  Patience replaces the pick-and-choose divisions of emotional acceptance.

Take.  What.  Can.  Be.  Gotten.

To romanticize birth and death misses the point.  

Revelations of human character, the acquisition and loss of language, the dreamed of essential, distilled aspects of being—come whatever they may be, shit reminds us in its stink and repulsive, revolting nastiness that an uncontrollable urge to vomit can at any moment replace whatever selfless will to nurture we imagine ourselves to possess.  

The truth is messy.  Or unexpected or unwelcome or all three, pleasant only as it disappears.  

The truth is that old women die as old women, passed sexual desirability and a nuisance in their  odd smells and fickle, at best imaginative attempts at recreating past moments of relevance.  

Even those most sympathetic and caring nurses draw on reserves of pity, secular indemnity against what for them, too, is next—and in some cases as a means for redoubling religious reassurance in pious, abstinent, timeless matronly virtue.  Though neither excuse the most troubling question: if you can’t even remember who you are but still want to get fucked, or at  least acknowledged, hand taken and smiled at by whatever man appears single and charming, does that make you a slut or a person or merely a woman?

Guys just slap asses and make passes with little worry about whether or not they’ll be recognized.  An old flirt is the only cute flirt, levity to counter the de facto wisdom that accrues to men as they age.

The best a woman can hope for is to dissolve Mother Teresa-like into devotion for anything but herself.  Where is the reserve of exemplary, older women in possession of contemplative fulfillment balanced with an open pursuit of physical satisfaction? No Socrates-like lady has been gazed upon to reveal a vision of the gods.

However equally naked we may have been born the images of gender in which we are made carry us to our graves obscuring however slightly the neat circularity of shit into, shit out of.  I  wonder if this is a mark of strength or weakness.  Or for solace do we avoid the issue so that virility and vitality can remain free from shittiness?  

To ask the question another way: knowledge brought shame to Adam and Eve and caused them  to cover their nakedness, so is it beyond knowledge to see shamelessly your mother naked, fearful, incontinent, paranoid about going the bathroom?  

Avoiding the muck obviates a deeper question of pleasure.  Oddly amidst the extreme feelings operative at the end of life—pain, solace, grief, forgiveness—no space is given to pleasure.  

So close to the sexual liveliness we create through near constant efforts of appearance, thought, conversation, anticipation and reflection—so close to that for which we live, it cannot trespass the innocence of birth or the absence of death.  

Endless magazine covers’ youthful promises of lust fulfillment to the contrary, pleasure may be farther from these day-to-day yearnings and closer to the poles of our existence than would ever make us comfortable.

The basic power of touch can reassure a sense of being in even the most desolate emotional  landscape.  Literature is rife with examples of words spoken or heard as dramatic counterpoint to life in extremis, so large a bounty because no utterance has yet been found to express the soft touch of a hand, the encircling arms of a hug or the warm, gentle feel of parting lips left from a kiss on the forehead.  

Even language depends more on the warmth of breath, care gestured upon the face and the mere noise of love rather than any reality signified by words.

In the rare pockets of lucidity that interspersed my mother’s speedy departure from 
consciousness she would hold out her stuffed cat and invite me to pat it, complimenting his softness.  He was more alive that anything else in her world.

How does sex hold pleasure hostage?  Power, passion and control define the prowess we imagine as necessary to culminate the deepest urges and greatest reaches of satisfaction.  Even fantasies of conquest require an animated innocence itself a gesture of coercion and dominance.

Worse, birth and death capitulate to this quarantine of pleasure by claiming pain for their emotional quota.  Yet from sublimity and sadism alike we known that the two are not mutually exclusive and in fact cannot be taken apart.  

At the beginning of life the rush towards responsibility, maturity, and independence acts similarly to disavow the mingled experience of injury and enjoyment.  When do we learn that laughter and tears should be considered opposites?

I spent the last portion of my mother’s life as her legal guardian, an oddly placed twenty-something male, eyes opened widely to the unpleasant process of dying as a woman alone, destroyed by dementia, at once the object of prejudice and protection.  I hope my experience speaks across generations and genders that too often remain hidden from each other.  

Matters as mundane as life and death deserve as much attention as those more visible or extreme forms of gender discrimination and sexual difference that occupy most cultural commentary.  

Behind glamour feminism must ensure a fullness of being from beginning to end.

They should know not to lie with history

She's an awfully fickle bedfellow... especially when you can't see both sides of your own argument.

From Ed Kilgore on Kevin Williamson in the National Review.

Rather:

Interesting but the logic is backwards. It's not about arming the citizenry to defeat a modern military-industrial state. 

For '76ers, they feared how easily their rights could be trampled if the crown had a "standing army" (think Boston Masacre) -- this had been a topic of complex controversy in England / Britain for two centuries beforehand. 

The people needed to have the well regulated militia in their hands, rather than the monarch reigning with an enormous and enormously expensive army or, from the vantage point of the late 1700s, a globally supreme navy, able to disrupt trade anywhere in the world. 

Hence the amendment protecting us from the quartering of soldiers, too. 

There's as much an anti-establishment and anti-aristocratic strain to the amendment as well -- just like they didn't want a state church, like the Church of England. Only the a very few gentlemen commoners or the nobility could "bear a coat of arms" -- could posses heraldry and the like. 

The founders wanted no distinction in rank, and hence the focus on a joint militia, rather than an individual liberty to amass guns in a way that could threaten other people's property -- that could lead to the tyranny of the one or the few over the many.

Indeed, that's a rather radically apposite idea to anything Locke would have argued, for instance.

For a more extensive and present decent event-based narrative, read this.

To teach gender and sexuality

Click this link for: Reflections on the gender roles into which we're cast.

All Most Violent

On Friday, nearly three weeks ago, a knot formed in my stomach and then as I listened to the news another knot, and another, and another, until I was literally brought to the floor in anguish from the knotted weight of the horrors that kept being spoken out of my radio.  

Why do I keep hearing this story over and over again?

Is it an American thing, a gun thing, a unique culture of violence fueled by movies and video games and water guns and nerf guns and dressing up like soldiers for Halloween, or that plus a literally insane problem with the lack of care for those who are mentally ill?

None of it, and all of it. 

But not out of nihilistic futility or depressive inaction or shocked paralysis.   As Kurt Vonnegut writes every time a character dies in Slaughterhouse-Five, “so it goes.”  Dresden, fire bombed, burning flesh, scorched corpses, so it goes.  Nagasaki, so it goes, Hiroshima, so it goes.  It goes and goes and goes.  

Columbine, Oak Creek, Aurora, Wounded Knee, the great American frontier.  So. It. Goes.  

Or from the poetic mind of  Robert Frost: “In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”

Does our uniquely salvation-oriented culture believe so deeply that at judgment all our sins will be washed away, Christ having been made flesh to save those predestined for heaven?  

I’m not sure if I’ll get in, but fingers crossed.

Despite all the immigration and melting-potting of America, do we still live the subconscious lives of Puritans?  

These amazing founders — men and women (look up Anne Hutchinson, early New England trouble-maker) — truly believed that some had been saved, some had been damned, and absolutely nothing anyone did on this earth could make the slightest bit of difference.  They despised the Catholic notion of confession and penance.

All we have, all we can know, is the time God created on earth, a pre-planned, teleological narrative that unfolded according to His will and bracketed by a sort of divine parentheses: Creation on the one end, and Revelation on the other.  

Our job, the Puritans believed, was to just screw up or be successful in the ways God intended.  They also believed he wouldn’t hesitate to send reminders if they went astray (think Indian attacks, earthquakes, hurricanes, illness &c.)

****Begin History Lesson, feel free to skip****

All this worked well until some people, ever eager to eat of that tree of knowledge, wanted to figure out who was saved and who was damned—to separate the wheat from the chaff.  Legend has it that in a moment of terrible despair, a mother threw her baby down a well and killed it because she knew if she managed this feat, she would have to be one of the damned and so could give up worrying about it all.  The Puritans really believed in all this.

To make a long story short, they came to think of some as “visible saints,” but then folks got worried as to whether being saved meant your kids would be saved (if not, that’s one heck of an inheritance tax).  Thus the halfway covenant and, in a curious way, the Salem Witch Trails and many other persecutions of witchcraft around New England in the late 1680s and early 1690s.

After this craziness, they realized things had gotten a bit out of control: and it seemed like the world had finally settled down a bit, England’s Glorious Revolution having brought an assuredly Protestant monarch to the thrown.  And they were on the cusp of a century of Catholic-hating warfare, primarily against France and Spain.  Many, many years of war—the poor, empressed as sailors, soldiers pushed to fight on an increasingly world-wide scale—the poor went off to battle—“cannon fodder”—as Linda Colley has called them.

Finally, Britain beat France in the Seven Years War (some of you may know it as the French and Indian War) and Britain now reigned supreme.  A world-wide empire, incubating for a couple centuries, had been born.  France lost, had their Revolution and later Napoleon; Britian lost thirteen of its American Colonies, had a bit of a crisis of conscious, and decided to ban the slave trade to help make themselves feel a bit more virtuous as they headed into the 19th century.  Folks sang Newton’s “Amazing Grace” and the sins they were relieved.

****End History Lesson****

Fast forward, and the United States keeps scratching its head about these rather bizarre religious forbearers: hence Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, Miller’s The Crucible, etc.  (Perhaps now with Guantanamo we’ve decided to outsource these tricky moments.)

In the last few weeks, teaching Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian to eleventh graders, I struggled to explain how his amazingly violent narrative of creation, futile wandering upon a barren land, and death as the only means to salvation — how all of this wasn’t too far off as an allegory for Biblical history.

We see through some perversely rosy-eyed glasses when we teach about and think about things like creation, Noah’s Ark, the life of Jesus, etc.

Think about it: God starts out with a pretty stern response to Adam and Eve’s misstep:  casting them out of paradise and essentially saying it’s misery and pain and inexplicable suffering from here on out.

Think about the flood: God killed every living thing on the whole planet—out of what’s hard to think of as anything but pure spite.

Finally, he sent a child, and set it up so we would kill him.  That’s a somewhat warped way of providing salvation.  Joy to the world!  The Lord is Born!

All this is to say, we have a lot more to think about in terms of our priorities, our blindness and our continued tolerance for what should be unthinkable violence.

Whether you believe in Him or not, God took not one of his children that Friday, but twenty.  

Charlotte.
Daniel.
Olivia.
Josephine.
Ana.
Dylan.
Madeleine.
Catherine.
Chase.
Jesse.
James.
Grace.
Emilie.
Jack.
Noah.
Caroline.
Jessica.
Benjamin.
Avielle.
Allison.

If Jesus gets The Holy Roman Empire, St. Peter’s, St. Paul’s Cathedral, two holidays—Christmas and Easter—just to name a few tributes—what does it look like when we’ve been reminded twenty-fold as to how perversely we’ve gone astray?

I would propose as one first nano-scale step the disbanding the NRA, outlawing hand guns and anything more than flintlock muskets.  (That’s Constitutional Originalism to my mind.)

Let’s turn swords into ploughshares, as the saying goes.

Then we can pause and reflect on what to do next.  

President Obama said, “This is our first task – caring for our children.  It’s our first job.  If we don’t get that right, we don’t get anything right.  That is how, as a society, we will be judged.”

Our children.  Indeed, “for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.”

How will we adults be left behind?  I think of the Inferno.  So it goes.

Now that we’ve averted the fiscal cliff, our politicians have no more excuses.  On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me: all of America’s guns melted as a grotesque sculpture to remind us of how horribly wrong we’ve been.

“We will be judged.”  So it goes.  So it goes.  So it goes.  

Until we make it stop.  No one else will.  Certainly not God.  So it goes.