• Tag Archives terrorism

  • Mystic Chords of Memory

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                                     Planting Moon

    Monday afternoon around 5:45 pm I turned on NPR as I drove on 694 headed toward Bill Schmidt’s home.  It was mid-report on something that had happened in Boston, something important, so I stayed with the news.  At a recap I learned of the bombings during the 4 hour plus mark of the Boston Marathon.

    I hollowed out and a sense of deep sadness raced in to fill the void.  The feelings from 9/11, not the event, but the feelings joined these.  Not anger.  Not bitterness.  Sadness and emptiness, a sudden vacuum in my interior world.

    (Summer Evening, Hopper)

    Then there was the ritual of repetitive reporting, the redundant witnesses, the guesses, the breathless commentary by this person and that one.  A reporter for Boston public radio said the Marathon would be forever marred.  And I thought, no.  No.  This will come to mind and it will be known as the work of an other and will not be allowed to mar the race, rather it will become part of the race’s history, its collective memory.

    The most intense part of my initial reaction came when I realized what those feelings meant, the emptiness and the sadness and the vacuum.  They meant I am an American.  That this event was about us, was done to us.  Here, on a highway in the northern central part of our large country I felt violated and hit.  It makes me think of Lincoln’s line about the mystic chords of memory.  It was those chords that bomb caused to resonate.  It’s important, I think, to say out loud that those bonds make us strong and that it is good that we feel them.

    It comes from the close of his 1st inaugural address:

    “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture Feelings US History 📎and tagged

  • The Year We Make Contact

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter                                     Full Moon of Long Nights

    Hmmm.  You know you’re getting old when the sequels to movies, one’s you saw when they came out, are now getting passed by the actual dates.

    The year we make contact.  Indeed.

    What will the next 10 years be like?  On an equally geezerly note the end of this new decade, Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise, will find me 72 years old.  I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve known people that were 72 but I wouldn’t let my daughter marry one.  Of course, I don’t have a daughter, so that makes that easy.

    My sense, my hope is, that in this coming decade, the teen years of this century, we will come to grips with climate change and in a way that will have a lasting, positive impact.  We won’t have completed the Great Work, the movement to a benign human presence on the earth, but we will have made substantial strides.

    Terrorism will decline as a front-burner issue, though it will remain with us, if for no other reason than the continuing disparity between rich and poor countries, disparities exacerbated over the next ten years by the continued growth of India and China.

    The Millennium generation will push us further toward a race neutral or race positive world.  It may be that we will develop the strength to see difference as a possibility for enrichment.  Or, maybe not.  I hope the tension begins to move in such a way that the fulcrum tips toward embracing pluralism.

    At the end of this decade the grandkids will be ten years older:  Ruthie 13 and Gabe 11.  Yikes.

    By the end of this decade I hope Kate and I have got this gardening thing well integrated into our lives.

    I hope for, I want a move toward, as one foundation puts, “a more just, verdant and peaceful world.”


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Great Work Health Politics 📎and tagged

  • Which is More of A Health Threat: Al-Qaeda or Homeland Security?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    1  64%  25%  1mph WNW  bar29.97  windchill-1  Winter

                Waxing Gibbous Crescent Moon

    OK.  This is interesting.

     Which is more of a threat to your health: Al Qaeda or the Department of Homeland Security?

    “An intriguing new study suggests the answer is not so clear-cut. Although it’s impossible to calculate the pain that terrorist attacks inflict on victims and society, when statisticians look at cold numbers, they have variously estimated the chances of the average person dying in America at the hands of international terrorists to be comparable to the risk of dying from eating peanuts, being struck by an asteroid or drowning in a toilet.

    But worrying about terrorism could be taking a toll on the hearts of millions of Americans. The evidence, published last week in the Archives of General Psychiatry, comes from researchers who began tracking the health of a representative sample of more than 2,700 Americans before September 2001. After the attacks of Sept. 11, the scientists monitored people’s fears of terrorism over the next several years and found that the most fearful people were three to five times more likely than the rest to receive diagnoses of new cardiovascular ailments.”

    The article goes to identify roughly 10 million people affected by the, what else to call it, fear-mongering of the Department of Homeland Security.  Can anyone say Committee of Public Safety?  I agree with the article and the physicians that the health consequences to individuals are significant and in themselves alarming; but, I believe the larger health problem is that of the body politic.  10 million voters with a fear of terrorism so significant that it affects their personal health represent a voting bloc, a demagogues paradise.  Now let me see, have we had anyone playing the terrorism card in recent elections?

    Going to the Walker Art Center tonight to see the TEAM, a group of performance artists who have a work called, Heartland.  I’ll let you know how it was. 


    📂This entry was posted in General News of the Strange Politics 📎and tagged