Idle tears

Recently I came again upon Tennyson’s moving poem, “Tears, Idle Tears,” resonant with the poet’s regret for days and friends reduced to memory; spent days that can never be renewed.

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart of things, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

I think we’ve all known, even the toughest among us, those days when we really don’t want to laugh, we feel out-of-sorts, and not necessarily because things haven’t gone well. We’re just not fun to be around. How does it happen, this sudden change in mood, like a hovering cloud, casting its shadow? We may even weep.

Tears have a way of bringing-us in touch with the cavernous depths of our deeper selves; as such, they’re often messengers of our need to clarify, to discern the wheat from the chaff, to both forfeit and embrace. Tears give opportunity for a tabula rasa, or clean slate.

As Merle Shain put it, “Unexpected emotions are a good way to figure out what hurts us. Tempers that flare about unimportant things, tears that appear at odd times when we don’t expect them, tell us what we feel even when we aren’t telling ourselves (Hearts That We Broke Long Ago).

Many think it unseemly to weep, especially men who frequently dismiss it as weakness. In a world of poverty, war and disease, I wish we’d weep more. In war, especially, we often lose our capacity to feel, which is to say we forfeit our humanity. At the personal level, we lose our potential to discern our best self.

I have always liked the sensitive ones for their defining gentleness, limitless compassion, abounding insight; their ability to weep for another’s pain or unjust fate.

They are the lucky ones. They are the noble ones.

Life’s law of averages

I had just been finishing up Michael Lewis’ Moneyball, inspired by the recent movie by the same name, when I came across his Bill James quote that startled me in its confirmation of my own lifelong observations on the ups and downs of human fortune:

Every form of strength covers one weakness and creates another, and therefore every form of strength is also a form of weakness and every weakness a strength. The balance of strategies always favors the team which is behind. Psychology tends to pull the winners down and push the losers upwards.

I said startled because it triggered this vivid flashback to Dr. Maddox’s wonderful eye-opening college class in American Literature Survey way back in the mid-sixties. We had been reading American philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, classic essays like Nature, The Over Soul, and The American Scholar. Now it was Compensation, which became my abiding favorite. It’s not often you read or hear something years back and remember it keenly.

Emerson, who grieved the loss of his 8-year old son, wrote the essay to assuage his sorrow–the idea that life is volatile and not always under our control. Still, a kind of karma exists, or law of averages governs, as a baseball fan might say. With talent comes weakness. (I think of the Achilles heel syndrome; in baseball, the phenomenon of an extended winning streak, followed paradoxically by a slump; the latter notoriously true of batters as well.) As Emerson put it, “Everything has two sides, a good and an evil. Every advantage has its tax.” Emerson’s law of compensation likewise offers solace that good can succeed pain.

I know Emerson’s philosophy can be simplistic, pilfering happiness by denying the reality of nature’s gratuitous wrongs and man’s calculated evil. The law of compensation I would rephrase as the law of balance, and it operates individually and universally in the cosmic roll of the dice. No ethical or religious import applies here. Again, as in baseball, the law of averages governs. We can gauge how long a pitcher will be effective in a game; determine player potential; measure the worth of successful stolen bases vs. times tossed out; the contribution of walks vs. hits, etc.

We employ the law of averages pervasively in economics. We know that market economies are cyclic; in insurance circles, that life expectancy can be measured, governing the issuance and policy cost; that even in the history arena, nations like mountains rise and fall.

This notion of balance has helped me come to terms with much of life’s sheer unfairness, what Rabbi Kushner compassionately tries to address in his popular When Bad Things Happen to Good People

I don’t worry, however. about the ethics of it. I know bad things happen, whether by way of tsunami or bullet; accident or malice. I also know good things happen, too, sometimes quite unexpectedly, call it hitting the lottery, if you will: getting the job, the promotion, the girl; the escape from the near accident.

Not always is luck with us. Sometimes you just get tossed from the game. Hopefully, the good proves more frequent than the bad.

On a trip to India many years ago I got into this fabulous discussion with an older man dressed entirely in white, including the famous Nehru hat. At one point, I used the phrase, “problem of evil” to which he replied, “Problem of evil? What problem of evil? Do we not have day and night? Heat and cold? Summer and winter?

Suddenly I understood. Life has its oppositions, as the biblical writer of Ecclesiastes so eloquently testifies in his summation of life’s polarities. There is a time to be born and a time to die; a time to sow and a time to reap, etc.

Our task is to do what we can, pushing the odds in our favor when we can. Bill James probably didn’t have Emerson or the Ecclesiastes writer in mind, let alone even read them, but it matters little. His words ring with the truth of human experience: “Every form of strength covers one weakness and creates another.”

This law of reciprocal balance offers both admonition and expectancy: that we take nothing for granted and that tomorrow can be better than today.

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Let’s do away with Columbus Day

I know this past Monday marked the observance of Columbus Day, but traditionally it’s been October 12 in keeping with Columbus’ historic landfall in the New World in 1492. Like many of you, I grew up on the Columbus lore, right down to his three ships, the Santa Maria, Nina and Pinta.

I’ve been thinking about the guy a lot in the last 24-hours after watching Thom Hartmann’s TV talk show on Monday. Hartmann, by the way, is America’s foremost talk host for the political left, or the progressives as they increasingly call themselves. Hartmann doesn’t like Columbus one bit. In fact, he calls Columbus a pathological killer guilty of genocide. Is this simply another revisionist history from the Left? What are the facts about this man anyway?

The truth is we may never know, as a lot of embellishment has occurred over the 500 years since his “discovery” of America. While we grew up learning the names of his ships, we now know we got the names wrong on two of them.

Nor was Columbus the first European to discover the Western hemisphere. The viking Leif Ericson voyaged here centuries earlier. There may have been others still earlier such as the Irish voyager, St. Brendhan of Clonfert.

And Columbus didn’t prove the world was round either. Virtually all the intelligentsia of the time held to a spherical view. It wasn’t his point anyway. His motive was to line his pockets by offering an alternative trade route. Land routes to China and India via the Middle East were proving hazardous, given Arab marauders.

Anyway, he was considerably off in charting the distance to India. Originally, he had offered his services to Portugal, but they glimpsed an easier route around the horn of Africa, and they were right.

At an earlier point in his life, he lived as a pirate, plundering Moor ships.

We’ve grown-up, thinking he was Italian. Evidence, however, may point to Corsica. As for his parents, it’s conceivable they were converted Jews.

We don’t even know where Columbus is buried, since his remains have been moved several times.

But what do we know about the man? I wish he could stay on my hero list in this age of debunking, but I’m afraid he’s grown suspect in the light of recent, more astute scholarship, which you can pursue in any good history on Haiti or in books by Madison Smart Bell.

It’s clear from his journal he was a devout Christian Catholic, but this didn’t keep him from looking upon the Indians on Hispaniola as slave fodder. By he way, it was the intervention of a priest arguing the potential for converts that finally won Ferdinand and Isabella’s ’s consent for the undertaking. On arriving on Hispaniola, he was met by friendly Taino; on his second visit, however, Columbus and his men took nearly 2000 of them captive. In the words of one of his literate crew, Miguel Cuneo,

when our caravels were to leave for Spain, we gathered one thousand six hundred male and female persons f those Indians, and these we embarked in our caravels on February 17, 1495. For those who remained, we let iet be know (to the Spaniards who manned the island’s fort) in the vicinity that anyone who wanted take some of them could do so, to the amount desired, which was done.

In fairness to Columbus, however, Hartmann is over-the-top in alleging genocide. Yes, the Indians were decimated and disappeared from Hispaniola within 50 years, but due to diseases such as small pox, against which they lacked immunity. (Ironically, in one of fate’s paybacks, they introduced the Europeans to syphilis.)

On the other hand, Columbus and his brothers were ruthless exploiters, plundering the wealth of indigenous peoples for their own gain like so many subsequent colonists the world over. With his brothers, he established a family dynasty and was despised. Several assassination attempts were made, and ultimately he would be sent back to Spain in chains, though later released.

Moreover, Columbus set into motion the subsequent arrival of the cruel conquistadors in the New World.

All of this marks a horrendous chapter in the history of the Americas, and in own nation’s participation in its legacy by way of our Indian wars.

Some argue that Columbus was simply a man of his time and culture. I don’t buy into this easy acceptance of crimes against humanity. Neither do the just in all generations, however few, in their vehement protest against the criminality of a culture.

This is one holiday we should do away with.

Richard Dawkins visits Kentucky

I just learned from the local Lexington Herald that Richard Dawkins, well-known for his outspoken atheism, spoke Wednesday evening at nearby Eastern Kentucky University to a packed audience of several thousand; in fact, there were three overflow rooms. Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University, is a widely published author especially known for two books, The Selfish Gene, and The God Factor.

His visit surprised me, since I’ve never associated Kentucky with progressive thought in the 34-years I’ve lived here. I’m delighted, especially with the large student turnout, giving me hope that just maybe thinking young people are increasingly questioning cultural legacies, want to know the truth, and are finding courage to pursue it. We live in a new era, and many of the verities that guided us no longer fit humanity in a scientific age.

My admiration for Dawkins runs deep and yet I’ve also some reservations. Dawkins might be thought of as one of the New Atheists who’ve arrived upon the scene, openly aggressive in challenging theism, or the notion of a deity behind the material creation, purposive and caring . I think of Christopher Hitchens and Samuel Harris as other spokespersons for this school. It’s like having Thomas Paine with us again.

Dawkins sometimes resembles the doctrinaire religionists he fervently denounces, taking no prisoners, often resorting to derision, if not mockery, of any believer, whether liberal or fundamentalist. His assumption is that supernaturalism is founded on absurdity, not reason, or akin to believing the earth is flat. Our challenge is to confront cultural a priories, insisting on empirical data. No quarrel from me on that score. It’s the way we go about it.

My model for secularism would be Michael Parenti, the astute socio-political observer who has written many thought-provoking books on myriad issues. I would especially recommend God and his Demons, hard-hitting, yet generous toward sincere believers who help their fellows rather than persecuting them, open to science and reason. Parenti wars on the theocratic mind, with its legacy of hatred and violence, not religion per se.

As non-believers it’s incongruous to imitate the mind-set of those with whom we disagree. If we are right, then reasoned argument possesses its own sufficiency.

Postscript: Steve Jobs

I just came upon this Steve Jobs’ quote, originally conceived as an Apple ad, perhaps the most memorable ad ever made. I wanted to share it, since it sums up Steve’s vision and, of course, his legacy:

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward. Maybe they have to be crazy. How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels? We make tools for these kinds of people. While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

Steve Jobs: an uncommon hero

Appropriately, the news of Steve Job’s death popped-up on my iPad at bedtime, or about 10:30 PM. Instead of falling asleep, I tapped my news applications for details. Already, tributes were pouring-in from all over the world, perhaps the most eloquent from President Obama.

I became an Apple devotee in 2007 after years of discarded PCs, each generally down to a crawl after about three years, always under virus threat, at times confusing in their set-up and operation. In contrast, I’m typing on the same Macbook Pro laptop bought nearly five years ago, never a hiccup along the way, a little outdated in some of its features, but otherwise fully adequate for my needs. I paid more, but have outpaced that investment with its longevity. It’s like choosing a Lexus over a Corolla. Macs work the way all computers should.

Like many of you, I’ve branched out to other devices: iPod, iPhone, and last year, my favorite, the iPad. The latter has revolutionized my electronic life, virtually replacing even my laptop, except for productivity needs. Games, music, news, books, you name it, I have it all: ease embedded in quality.

Steve’s life amazes me. I’m talking biography rather than tech savvy. I hadn’t known he’d been put-up for adoption by his biological mother and was ultimately raised by working class parents, or that he had only one semester of college. Jobs had a taste for following the road less travelled, or this pluck most of us lack, the courage to seek the right fit, the fortitude to prevail. I’ve also learned he didn’t suffer fools gladly. He could be difficult, but he always played the hunch and followed his intuition.

Many rank him with Edison and Einstein in the impact of his genius. Actually, he was less inventor, much more innovator. He had a nose for good ideas that could be made better and surrounded himself with those who could materialize his vision. I understand this kind of creativity well. Writers like Vergil and Joyce could translate the extant into the revolutionary. Collectively, the Romans and contemporary Japanese are like this. Perhaps his greatest legacy, like that of all good teachers, was an ability to simplify the difficult. Apple devices exceed not only in their efficiency, but their ease.

I hadn’t known he ventured to India and returned a Buddhist devotee. His desire in life wasn’t to make money, but to live meaningfully. Simplicity characterized not only his products, but his life.

Brave beyond brave, and against all odds, he broke through not only economic and social barriers, but those posed by pancreatic cancer and its nearly always fatal consequence. Each new day he lived with hope.

Despite his outer success, he was in some ways “born under an unlucky star,” as the poet Keats might have put it. After all, 56-years is not a long-life. Paradoxically, he was also one of the luckiest of mortals. Most of us live longer, but not as well. Steve Jobs’s life, on the other hand, is the stuff of legends.

In 2005, Jobs gave the commencement address at Stanford University. In its wisdom and simple eloquence, its somber simplicity and earthly truths, the address affirms an uncommon realism of counting one’s days. Available online, it deserves a full-reading. In his honor, here are some of his final words to that youthful audience of just 6-years ago:

My third story is about death. When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “no” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important thing I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything–all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctors’ code for “prepare to die.” It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next ten years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure that everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope, the doctor started crying, because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and, thankfully, I am fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept. No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don’t want to die to get there, and yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it’s quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

My kind of poet: W. S. Merwin

Congratulations to poet W. S. Merwin on his 84th birthday (September 30). Of contemporary poets, I love him most now that Philip Larkin is gone. I was privileged to actually attend a reading by Merwin at the University of Kentucky so long ago that he was relatively young then.

Congratulations, too, on his selection last year to succeed Kay Ryan as our Poet Laureate. What took so long?

I find Merwin compelling for several reasons:

1. I admire his dexterity in translating. Like Merwin, I’ve always been drawn to languages. Merwin, along with writing 15-volumes of verse, excels in translating, with masterful renditions of Greek and Roman classics, Dante’s Purgatorio and Latin American poets such as Pablo Neruda among his many credits.

2. I adore his lyricism. It’s the way I try to write; indeed, am moved to write, the sense of articulating meaning through cadence, the transmitting of inner emotion to outer page, the reaching towards others via pathos. Poetry has its roots in music and good poets, like Merwin, resonate powerfully, coalescing imagery, sound, and rhythm into a human tapestry. Merwin is a poet better heard than read, returning us to the oral genesis of poetry.

3. I cherish his environmental centrism. I know of no other poet so imbued with such fervency for Nature, a concern for its restoration and sense of urgency for the rest of us to mind and mend our ways. Merwin’s own life bears out his witness to simplified living holding communion with landscape. In the early seventies, he and his wife retired to a remote area of northern Maui, building a house fully green and restoring a waste land former pineapple plantation into a verdant sanctuary, cultivating more than 750 species of endangered indigenous flora. Each day, Merwin plants a new palm.

4. I like his affinity with the East. In fact, he originally moved to Hawaii to study Zen. If I were of religious bent, I’d choose Buddhism with its inherent simplicity, gentleness and life-reference as the better way. Merwin, a devout Buddhist, says he shares the Eastern view for its emphasis on “being part of the universe and everything living. You don’t just exploit it and use it and throw it away anymore than you would a member of your family. You’re not separate from the frog in the pond or the cockroach in the kitchen.” To some like me who carries spiders from the house to the outdoors, this is sweet stuff.

Merwin isn’t the easiest to read with his antipathy towards punctuation and hovering mystery, but the yield rewards the effort. I‘ll close this post with an early Merwin poem I’ve especially liked:

“For the anniversary of My Death”

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveller
Like the beams of a lightless star
Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

–rj

A country boy at heart

I have never really liked cities. Perhaps it goes back to childhood memories of growing-up in Philly:  stifling summer heat drenched in humidity, treeless streets, absence of playgrounds, intermittent rumble of the El,  violence drifting like smoke from any corner or up an alley.  My father and I watched a GI one day from our window being pounded by several youths; once, as a 10-year old on my way to school, I was way-laid by a gang, one of them excitingly waving a pistol.  There were other incidents.
They didn’t open-up the hydrants like they do now to give relief to city children.  Pa would give me a dime for the movie matinee, families would sit on marble stoops in row house streets into late evening, eager for incipient breezes enticing sleep.  Occasionally, Donald, my older brother, would drive Pa and me to Atlantic City for a Sunday outing and the Jersey shore.
This solace more frequently turned regret on our evening return, stuck in bridge traffic,  sweltering in the always faithful embrace of steamy asphalt. (No car ac back then.) Once a year, the first two weeks of August, we’d migrate back to New England, our family’s original homestead.  If there was ever an Eden, it was New England with its spatial greenery of mountains, apple orchards with trees in soldierly row, tranquil dairy farms tucked-in neatly by boulder walls.  At night, drowsiness descended easily amid the cadence of the nearby surf’s rhythmic thump upon the shore, Nature’s calm heart beat signaling all’s well.
Cities have their attractions.  They provide an a la carte menu of things to do, sure to please any palate—a rock concert, a baseball game, infinite movie choices, museums, gargantuan shopping malls, even a zoo. You want it, it has it.
But cities are good at make-up.  They excel at covering blemishes with their efforts to shampoo the dandruff of long neglect, redressing the urban core in mirror high rises nearly silver in their skyward reach and newly created green respites with their ubiquitous fountains.  These are good, well-meaningful efforts.  Still, they point to a human longing for relief from urban sterility with its jack-hammer noise; treeless streets; traffic-jammed arteries akin to arterial plaque, threatening well-being; multitudes of the anonymous with their latent danger.  Around the corner, a clinging poverty of seedy neighborhoods of paint-peeling houses, boarded windows, good people trapped by race, unemployment, and few skills, reservations of the forgotten ransacked by thieves, addicts, and drug dealers, gangs providing substitute dignity.
In our down economy, the problems of the city have increasingly spread to suburbia,  like some insidious infection, threatening an epidemic.  New government stats startlingly reveal that poverty is now a growing fixture in metropolitan areas, once offering bucolic sanctuaries of   relief from adjacent urban jungles. Doubtless, this new poverty is by-product of government programs to provide social mobility, or access to where the jobs, better schools, and ample medical facilities often are.  The housing bust factors in, too, along with immigration.  Consider that suburban poverty population has increased 74.4% in the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metropolitan area;  121% in the Las Vegas-Paradise suburbs;  69%, Louisville-Jefferson County-IN; surprisingly, the Austin, TX suburbs at 150.5%.  Metropolitan Poverty  This scenario, alas, is nation-wide.
If our suburbs are proving to be a new semblance of beached hopes, where then do we turn?
For me, it’s never been about  the city or suburb since my outlook has been largely shaped by memory.   By disposition, I’m also pretty much a Romantic, maybe even defining the term.  I cherish space.  I like gardens, not malls.  I’m keen on Jane, Joe, Mary and Bob.  I’m afraid of people.  I don’t like what crowds can do when they shed anonymity.  My home represents safety.  It shuts out that urban dissonance that headlines our daily news.  Like all Romantics, I’ve always preferred distance to proximity.
Karen and I recently returned from San Francisco.  When you think of San Francisco it’s likely to conjure up images of an idyllic setting on hills overlooking a foggy bay–cable cars, Fisherman’s Wharf, Telegraph Hill, China Town, the resplendent Golden Gate Bridge.  And it’s truly this and even more, so far as cities go.  Still, here as in all our cities, the toxic fumes assaulting lungs, its  overweening traffic taking us more than an hour to egress to I280, the paucity of parking, sometimes at $20 for every three minutes, or $48 a day.  Walking the streets was uncomfortable, even in daylight, accosted by panhandlers, beady stares, and sometimes vulgar comment.  We took flight back to our car, locking our doors immediately, hurriedly making our exit from this, one of America’s most storied cities.  Cities are inherent with danger.
I’ve lived in several big cities:  Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago.  I’ve been in many more.  Put me down for an occasional cautious visit, but mind you this: what I like best about cities is not the getting into cities, but the getting out.

Death’s reprieve: thoughts on human mortality

All of us, by being born, are immediately under a death sentence, how, when, or where unknown. As an English major and teacher, I came to realize early that the stuff of poetry nearly always comes down to mortality. I often think it’s this aesthetic appreciation of finiteness that propels all great Art, that only through the Imagination, or human creativity, do we get a chance to stave off ending in the creation of an artifice unassailable by time. And yet even here, we deceive ourselves as Keats reminds us in his poignant “Ode to a Nightingale.” Can there be solace in the grave with its suspension of awareness? When our endeavors are the stuff for other ears? In a world where even memory itself becomes cloyed with life’s pursuit? A world where even those who know us best age and succumb?

Sometimes death stalks us at elbow range, and we haven’t the faintest idea how close we’ve come. I think of December, 1981 in Kerala, India, when I nearly lost my balance tottering along a narrow beam as I exited from a river vessel. I didn’t know how to swim.

In June, 1983, returning from my son’s West Point graduation with my wife and daughter, I was driving in the mountains of Western Maryland along a three lane highway, with my present lane about to merge. Unfortunately, a semi-truck was laboring up the sharp ascent in front of us. I foolishly gambled I could pass before the lane gave way, only to find that three lanes suddenly narrowed into two with a car in the other lane approaching at breakneck speed. Trapped in a spatial pincher, I accelerated, threading a narrow opening between the truck and oncoming car. As I swung past, maybe a foot to spare on either side, I heard the car’s screeching brakes as I viewed in my mirror its desperate careening to right itself in its lane. I had teased Eternity’s border

And then there have been those plane journeys: planes nearly colliding because of tower errors, violent storms, a propeller no longer working (this one in the military flying over the Sea of Japan, all of us in parachutes).

Sometimes death comes looking for us close to home. Last week, for instance, on just a late afternoon trip to the grocery store, a big bumper in your face pick-up came speeding round a curvy bend hogging the already narrow road, sending me off the road to avoid a head-on crash. I didn’t have time to think; I reacted instinctively.

Two weeks ago, I took my annual blood work-up. Several days later, I got the mailed results. Bilirubin levels were elevated. Concerned, my doctor scheduled me for a follow up hepatic test and abdominal scan to check liver function and for gall stones, tumors, and cancer of the gallbladder or pancreas. Now anxious, I didn’t find relief in reading in my Mayo guide that elevated bilirubin levels indicated cancer. A short 36-hours after the test the doctor’s office called: the tests had turned out normal.

I got away yet again; yet I don’t fool myself. It’s kind of a hide and seek game we play with death. Sooner or later, it finds you.

One thing I learned from this most recent episode: how many are caught in death’s net, every year, month, week, day, hour, minute, and second. I note their anguish, their physical suffering, their often painful, slow demise. I have found my passion for others renewed; my sense of life lived in the context of the meaningful quickened; a heightened sensitivity to the beauty of every new day to be relished; a sharpened awareness of temporality’s potential to enhance.

To live life rightly helps our not clutching it. In fact, it helps us let go.

Obama’s assault on Social Security

Although vociferously claiming entitlement programs aren’t on the table in securing deficit reductions, the President’s recent actions prove his rhetoric to be little more than political chicanery in upholding the integrity of Social Security, for an example. In an effort to stimulate the economy by putting more money into our pocketbooks, President Obama has proposed continuing the payroll tax reduction (now 4.1%) for Social Security. In fact, he wants to cut the Social Security payroll tax still further, or to 3.1% of earnings below the traditional maximum of 6.2% on $106,800 income. This amounts to a $240 billion dollar funding hit on Social Security, a program already in trouble due to changing age demographics. In 25-years, it will only be able to pay out $75.00 on every $100.00 owed in benefits.

More specifically, his proposal represents a direct raid on the Social Security Trust Fund, short-changing our young people. As is, his proposal cuts $175 million from the employment payroll contributions and $65 billion in employment contributions. The President’s new, massive stimulus package before Congress, $440 billion, draws 55% of its funding from Social Security funding. You do the math. It’s simply untenable, an indulgence in political opportunism, betraying American workers and their future.

Compounding the demographic and political pressures on Social Security, today’s massive unemployment has ignited a rush in applications for disability income (SSDI). According to the government’s own figures, applications showed a 21% increase just between 2008 and 2009. While the rising number of aging baby boomers may account for some of this increase, it seems more likely this sudden swell has is origin in our down economy. Frankly, one has to suspect Social Security is being used as a ruse for welfare in many instances. Obtaining benefits also qualifies one for Medicare, no matter one’s age.

In its defense, the Social Security administration argues it has strict monitoring procedures in place to assure legitimacy in the application process, with only 30% of applications approved. This is true, however, only at the initial application stage. While denied applications going through the appeal process can take up to 2-years, persistence pays and ultimately most applicants, or 67%, get their benefits approved before an Administrative Law Judge. Meanwhile, legal representation for applicants has turned into a lucrative specialty.

What’s mind-numbing is that this deluge in disability applications is leading some trustees of the Social Security disability program recommending Congress reallocate money from the Social Security Retirement program to offset deficits in disability funding!

As is, the present and proposed cuts in Social Security payroll taxes don’t offer assistance to the many unemployed, retired, disabled or those, like teachers, who are ineligible for SS. More substantially, short-changing Social Security exacerbates its perilous future.