Skip to main content
Independence Day! was yesterday (duh), and one of the best celebrations in a long while. Of course we wrap ourselves in glow sticks and launch water balloons at each other in blissful forgetfulness, ignoring the facts. That our country is owned by China, our state is spitting on the Constitution (to its own detriment), and we are missing a president. I mean, they tell me we have a president, but I haven't really noticed any real leadership happening. We have a celebrity, but didn't we already have a bunch of those? Yeah, so there's a lot to be frustrated about. I guess the thing to do is to rise above it. If our leadership sucks, that's just reason for us to be the better man. Or woman. If our country spends extravagantly and stupidly, that's just reason for us to learn sound judgment with our personal finances. And if our nation compromises its integrity by parceling itself out to foreign nations that have little regard for human rights or the health of our earth, why it is possible (though not easy) to boycott the whole business. It just means that we have to be more conscientious people. Scratch that. Conscientious is too tame. We have to be hard-core. We have to be both severe and extravagantly forgiving. We will run the risk of seeming inconsistent, but we will at least be good. Happy fifth of July.

Comments

  1. Wonder Jens05 July, 2009 19:18

    I would have rather been there. I got tiered of fixing peoples broken costumes and I didn't even get to see anything yesterday.

    Anime people are weird.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Unknown05 July, 2009 21:08

    but definitely independent. marching to the toot of their own horn, the beat of their own percussion instruments, etc.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

window in the sub

Dear Nathaniel, I am microwaving pie that Mom bought up in Oak Glen this week on her way home from the orthodontist. As I put it in the microwave, I was full of sadness that I was not in Oak Glen with her. Why did I not go? I was working. I want to see the trees turn. I want to wander slowly through autumnal gift shops. Under the water, you cannot sense the approach of the seasons. Even here it is difficult because, after all, it's California. But I can still sense it. After three seasons in Illinois and one in Scotland, it must be with me for good. Or at least for a while. Because I am all abuzz with eagerness for fall and winter, for turkeys and dried leaves and Santa. I should start cooking again this fall. Fall foods are my favorite. Baked squash dripping with melted butter and brown sugar, pumpkin soup... this year, if I have enough money, I will put together a holiday dinner for my friends. And we will drink Scandinavian mulled wine, which is the most wonderful thing I have e...
13 comments
Read more

Again in Gilead

I just finished reading this for the second time last week, thanks to the forever book group of Grace. It was equally as lovely the second time around, and while reading it, I wrote down a dozen more quotes from the incomparable Ames, who is both too beautiful a man to be real and too beautiful a man not to be real. (I'm grateful and amazed to know a few like him.) "It has been my experience that guilt can burst through the smallest breach and cover the landscape, and abide in it in pools and danknesses, just as native as water." (p.82) I have found this to be remarkably true. I see it in myself, and in many others as well. "I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect." (p.91) This seems to be about the only way I experience visions, but because memory is a rickety thing, I tend not to trust them much. Which makes me a poor prophet. "I know, too, that my own experience of the church has been, in many senses, shelte...
Post a Comment
Read more

Being a Baker

Working at the Main Library has surprising advantages. Just now I stepped out of my office, walked five paces across the hall, scanned a badge, and walked under the civic center plaza to the elevator that stretches from beneath the earth up to the mayor’s office on the fourteenth floor. I didn’t have so far to go—just up one level to the utilities counter, where a sympathetic, amused woman named Sue shut down my gas payments. It took less than five minutes. I finished packing up my kitchen days ago. My cake pans were in boxes sometime early last week. But as I walked through the underground loading dock on my way back to the office, I was distinctly aware of the finality of what I’d just done. I would never, from that moment on, be able to bake for anyone out of that kitchen. Maybe it doesn’t seem like a very big deal, but I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of a certain identity, namely being “the person who bakes a lot”. I made a tiered wedding cake for some friends (because...
2 comments
Read more