The Fire Escape

Yes, it’s true. My sister gave birth to her first child on October 30th and I just wanted to share (and perhaps give themblog just a little bit of love instead of the neglect it’s been receiving lately). To see pictures check out the photography blog HERE!

Weclome to Adalyn Grace 6.5lbs 21inches

No what could be better than Brian M. talking about politics????? Yes, I KNOW you all love him so you can thank me later….enjoy!

A plea for a new generation of Republican leadership

I believe our nation works best with robust and civic dialogue and civil debate. For mature societal conversations to take place, at least two mature parties are required, and looking back over this summer, a second party is hard to find.

The Obama administration needs a worthy loyal opposition, just as any group in power does, and the president himself often says so. But people who shout “hitler, nazi, socialist” don’t constitute a worthy loyal opposition. Nor do the birthers (who don’t stray too far from the fictional portrait of the afterbirthers described satirically here). Nor do the nostalgics, who seem to keep waking up in the 1980’s year after year, quoting Ronald Reagan.

[Regarding the nostaligics, one can't help but recall God's words to Joshua (Joshua 1:2): "Moses my servant is dead." Many Republicans, it seems, are like Joshua and need to be told it's time to move on and discover their own voice, to think their own thoughts, to face today's challenges, to start leading constructively and not just repeating old slogans - always revering the memory of their late-20th-Century Moses, of course, but moving on to face today's problems just as their oft-sung hero sought to face those of his day.] 
More after the jump …

It seemed hard for the situation to deteriorate below gun-toting protestors at town hall meetings and hitler-moustached posters, but we managed to hit a new even-lower low in recent days in the refusal of some parents and school districts to allow school children to listen to thepresidential back-to-school address. Journalist/author Thomas Friedman had it right on Meet the Press Sunday, as did Education Secretary Ame Duncan on Face the Nation: that reaction is just plain “stupid” and “silly.” How many Republican leaders will stand with them?

Where does this bizarre behavior come from? True, there’s a strain of extremism that runs through American politics on the left and right, and the internet, late-night radio, and cable TV help keep it alive. But there’s more to this, I think. I’m convinced that there is some degree of white fear and resentment behind at least some of this reaction: fear and resentment of an African-American president, mingled with xenophobia regarding brown-skinned immigrants, undergirded by fear of a future where there is no more racial majority status for white people. There is also, I suspect, a good amount of modernist fear of postmodernity mixed in. And where Christianity becomes a tribal religion rather than a reconciling faith – the exclusive and combative religion of rural non-coastal folks, for example, or Southern folks, or socially conservative folks, or folks who hold a certain economic ideology – there is probably some old-fashioned religious supremacy at play too: the “Our God is better than your god, so we should be in power” syndrome.

I keep wondering – don’t more Republicans themselves see the danger of an increasingly reactionary Republican party becoming in the 21st century what anti-Civil-Rights/pro-segregationists and McCarthyites were in the 20th, or what the pro-slavery/anti-abolition movements were in the 19th – conserving an unjust status quo that deserved to be left behind? Out of love for their party and the good things it could potentially stand for in 2012 and beyond, don’t they want to step forward now and be counted?

Even if all President Obama stands for were as dastardly as the shouters, birthers, and nostalgics insinuate, can’t some perceptive Republicans see the need to do what President Obama did to win the election – to inspire with some hope, rather than constantly pulling the levers of fear? Fear is indeed a powerful short-term motivator (and fund-raiser), as is revenge, but it uses an inflating currency (and where do you go after flashing the hitler/nazi/fascist credit card?). An unregulated fear-based politics will eventually crash just as an unregulated bubble-based economy will, but like a crashing economy, it can cause a huge amount of damage on its way down.

That’s why it’s so depressing to see the paucity of Republican leadership providing a mature alternative to all this. That’s why, with so much at stake – from environmental policy to health care reform to immigration reform to economic reform to foreign policy reform to campaign finance reform, even those of us who are firm supporters of President Obama wish his administration had a more robust conversation partner and a wiser, more constructive loyal opposition.

Thankfully, George Will has started speaking up with some fresh things to say, countering the long reign of neoconservative foreign policy in the Republican Party. Perhaps people like Will and Peggy Noonan represent the rise of a constructive conversation partner in the civic conversation. But they’re writers; where are the politicians? If there are some perceptive Republicans out there who see from the inside what the rest of us see from the outside, I hope they’ll start speaking up like George Will and Peggy Noonan – and soon. Because if the best leaders the Republicans can offer the nation and the world in the next decade are the likes of … well, I won’t mention names … then everyone will be worse off for it — Republicans, Democrats, everyone. I believe, hope, and pray that Republicans can do better for their party, for America as a whole, and for the world.

(oh, and just the usual disclaimer….just because I’m posting this AND I’m a Brian M. fan, DOES NOT mean that I agree 100% with everything he says, that would just be stupid now wouldn’t it? He’s just a dude, not God and to agree completely with one human on everything probably means you’re not the most rational thinker…..anyways, this disclaimer is turning into a blog post and I’m not in the mood to go there at the moment)

Thanks for reading!

I’m so annoyed with what’s going on politically right now that I don’t even want to look at the news…argh. It’s only more evidence of just how much people let their fear and selfishness take control….disgusting. I would blog more, but then that might create some long argument in the comments section which I am NOT in the mood for. Guess I just needed to vent…publicly. 

That is all.

I think that maybe I suck at blogging lately, well no, actually it’s a fact.

“While the poor of the world continue knocking on the doors of the rich, the world of affluence runs the risk of no longer hearing those knocks, on account of a conscience that can no longer distinguish what is human.” Pope Benedict XVI

I have been thinking about this a lot lately, and I must say well put Mr Pope.

So I took that strengths finder test that everyone is talking about…I’m more into Myers Briggs (I’m INFJ by the way), BUT I thought I’d give this one a shot, and they had us do it for church, so I cooperated. So below are my results….not sure I agree with ALL of them, but interesting results. Thought I’d share:

Consistancy

Adaptibility

Empathy

Connectedness

Intellection

There you have it!

A little bit of cute to balance out yesterday’s controversial. Come on, kittens bring everyone together!

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Enjoy this article by Jim Wallis….(it can be found on sojo.net)

Obama and Cheney: Dueling Visions of America

“Last week President Barack Obama and former Vice President Dick Cheney delivered back-to-back speeches on national security.

In these speeches, we witnessed a rare moment of clarity, a moral clash in the interpretation of reality, and one of the starkest contrasts in competing visions I have ever seen for the values, direction, and policies of our nation. In short, there was a choice offered to us for exactly what kind of country and people we want to be — and what America will mean for us and for the world.

First, President Obama offered a dramatically new direction for achieving national security, after the “misguided experiment” of the Bush years. In a very powerful symbol, Obama chose the National Archives as the venue for this major address, pointing to the historic documents that are kept here — the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights — noting that these documents are “the foundation of liberty and justice in this country, and a light that shines for all who seek freedom, fairness, equality, and dignity around the world,” and clearly suggesting that they have been violated in the policies of the U.S. over the past several years, policies that included the systematic violation of legal rights and even the use of torture.

Just minutes later, former Vice President Cheney rose to speak at the American Enterprise Institute to aggressively defend and forcefully argue for a confident continuation of those very policies, and to vigorously attack the “contrived indignation and phony moralizing” of those who have critiqued the policies of the Bush/Cheney years (which some suggest should be called the Cheney/Bush years). Even Cheney admitted the “great dividing line” that stands between these two visions of national security. Candy Crowley of CNN called the dueling speeches “a tale of two universes.” And they were.

The president began by saying that

… my single most important responsibility as president is to keep the American people safe.

But, he went on to say that

… I believe with every fiber of my being that in the long run we also cannot keep this country safe unless we enlist the power of our most fundamental values. … I make this claim not simply as a matter of idealism. We uphold our most cherished values not only because doing so is right, but because it strengthens our country and it keeps us safe. Time and again, our values have been our best national security asset …

He spoke of the “so-called enhanced interrogation techniques” that

… undermine the rule of law. They alienate us in the world. They serve as a recruitment tool for terrorists, and increase the will of our enemies to fight us, while decreasing the will of others to work with America. … In short, they did not advance our war and counterterrorism efforts …

And, on closing the prison at Guantanamo:

Guantanamo set back the moral authority that is America’s strongest currency in the world. …
[I]nstead of serving as a tool to counter-terrorism, Guantanamo became a symbol that helped al Qaeda recruit terrorists to its cause. Indeed, the existence of Guantanamo likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained.

Vice President Cheney, on the other hand, began and ended with 9-11 as the justification for everything that followed: “9-11 made necessary a shift of policy, aimed at a clear strategic threat …” He defended the “enhanced interrogation” by arguing that:

The interrogations were used on hardened terrorists after other efforts failed. They were legal, essential, and the right thing to do. … to completely rule out enhanced interrogation methods in the future is unwise in the extreme. It is recklessness cloaked in righteousness, and would make the American people less safe.

And Cheney’s view of values was that

… no moral value held dear by the American people obliges public servants ever to sacrifice innocent lives to spare a captured terrorist from unpleasant things. And when an entire population is targeted by a terror network, nothing is more consistent with American values than to stop them. … For all that we’ve lost in this conflict, the United States has never lost its moral bearings.

My father was a Midwestern evangelical Christian, and an Eisenhower Republican. His core values never changed, but his politics did as his party moved further and further to the right, and his children moved to embrace faith-inspired social justice. He was still alive for the election of 2004, and after a retired men’s breakfast sponsored by the Detroit church that he and my mother had started, somebody suggested that the group go hear Dick Cheney who was speaking that night in nearby Ann Arbor. That was a mistake. My dad coldly replied, “I wouldn’t go hear Dick Cheney if he was the last speaker on the planet. Dick Cheney is evil.” My father was known by everyone for his kindness and generosity, and nobody would have called him judgmental. But his judgments of people, in particular, were unusually good.

I will leave the judgment of Dick Cheney’s soul to God, who alone is in the position to render that judgment on all of us. But I will say the vision of America that Cheney offers is decidedly evil, and has helped to spread even more evil around the world. Cheney represents the dark side of America, a view of the world dominated by fear and self-righteousness—always a deadly combination. It accepts no real reflection or self-examination; the evil in the world is always external, and the threat ever present. There is only certainty, and never humility. And, when the dark side goes unchecked, what it leads to is a state of permanent warfare, which will only be won by using any means necessary, and where the ends always justify the means. At the end of his breathtaking speech, the former vice president was so full of admiration and praise for those who used “enhanced interrogation” against America’s suspected enemies that you got the impression he would happily preside over those brutal sessions himself.

But at their best, American values are different than that, and, as the new president said, we did things during the last several years with a “framework that failed to rely on our legal traditions and time-tested institutions, and that failed to use our values as a compass,” and that “too often our government made decisions based on fear rather than foresight; that all too often our government trimmed facts and evidence to fit ideological predispositions.”

A fundamental change is now being made in American policies, at which the rest of the world — and many Americans who had despaired over the course of their country — will breathe a deep sigh of great relief. We are seeing the beginning of the hope that healing will come to some of the damage to the world and to America that has been done by the rampage over our most important values.

The good news about these dueling moral visions of America is that the first was offered by a young new president who has a personal priority to change the image of America in the world — to the thundering applause of an audience at the National Archives. The second was offered by an aging figure of an old and imperial view of American leadership — rather, domination — in the world, which he wants to defend by any means necessary, to an increasingly marginal right-wing tank with only tepid applause.

The first is now the governing vision of American foreign policy, while the second is now a politically defeated ideology. Thanks be to God!”

Why put your dog in a stroller? WHY???

I just don’t get it.

I recently received an email from a company I frequently buy from (well, not so much anymore due to some rougher finances we’ve found ourselves in), correction, a company I USED to frequently buy from.  Now I just look at their products and appreciate them (tempt myself). They are Pangea Organics, in case you’re interested. I am on their email list and I liked what they had to say in the most recent one, so I thought I’d share. Check it out below:

“In the age of innocence…
Has anyone heard that we’re in a recession? I hear it all the time. It’s crazy, and the conversation is always followed by everyone blaming the big, evil corporations. Well, it’s true. Some of them are in fact evil by definition, but there’s something we are failing to see: one of the best things about a free economy or capitalism in general is that corporations will generally produce products that we want or have asked for. In fact, corporations spend millions of dollars trying to figure out the best way to produce and design the things we will buy. Isn’t that nice of them?
 
We said we wanted to live in houses that were too big for our wallets, so the mortgage companies created “the five year arm” and other financing products that allowed us to do just that. We said we wanted big – really big – cars that guzzled gas and polluted our planet, so the car companies created the SUV. We said we wanted cheap clothes so that our styles could change with the seasons with just a swipe of the plastic card (another issue all together), so the manufacturers started outsourcing production overseas and exploiting workers ages 8-80.
 
No one held a gun to our head and told us to buy these things, and no, commercials are not considered lethal weapons. So in the end, when we blame the corporations, aren’t we really just blaming ourselves?
The great thing about this mess we are in is that it started with us; therefore, it can end with us. “How?” you ask. Well now is the time to raise our consumeristic conscientiousness. I’m sure many of you reading this are already on the path, but there’s no time for walking it: start jogging.
Tell the corporations what you want and how you want it. Trust me; they will start doing it right.”

We vote with what we buy, it’s true….consider that when you make your purchases….I’m no saint, perfectly selecting sustainable products as my only purchases, but small steps my friends, at least think about what you’re buying and where it comes from…..hopefully those corps will listen (although I’m not as optimistic as the person from Pangea  when it comes to the joys of capitalism, but it’s true what they say, our purchases drive them, I just tend to be more of a cynic though, so that’s just me).

One more quote? Ok, you convinced me….. This brings to mind something I just read by Donald Miller. He says, “I think every conscious person, every person who is awake to the functioning within this reality, has a moment where he stops blaming the problems of the world on group think, on humanity and authority, and starts to face himself. I hate this more than anything.” Amen Don, Amen    

 ps. listen to Devotchka’s “How it Ends”  it’s good, very good, I could eat it….almost

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