WE ARE HIS PEOPLE

It was Father’s Day.

FINDING GOD IN THE DAILY NEWS, THE NEW YORK TIMES

 

Do you trust in God, even when health and safety are threatened?  That was what the news stories were about:  How in realities, health and safety were threatened.  Money was the financial security in life.  In Iowa and Wisconsin this week, properties not insured against flooding were threatened. And if people were complaining about the cost of food and oil, well, the affects of these uninsured losses to crops will be felt by all of us.  The middle class would soon be sharing in the suffering of the majority of the invisible poor the world over.  Watch the futures this week on corn and grain prices.

 

Suffering challenged the complacent.  When more people began to suffer, it began to challenge public policy.  With the affluence of the last ten or fifteen years, was it little wonder why public policy in the U.S. favored the rich?  Suffering did teach people to view their neighbor.  And when I was more like my suffering neighbor, acts of compassion grew.

 

For those who were willing to worship with the sacrament that reconciled, there one day was a realization that those sins that were forgiven seemed to repeat themselves over time.  Greed.  Lust.  Avarice.  It was why we were all like Galdys Kravitz, looking through the venetian blinds at our neighbors.  It was why we read the news. 

The story of history was that the same lesson applied to the human race.  The realization that those past wars, atrocities, crimes that were supposed to be forgotten, seldom forgiven, seemed to repeat themselves over. Reconciliation was directed at the hearts of the people, one by one, to change. 

WOMEN AND THEIR BIOLOGICAL CLOCKS

Did you ever notice how active a woman was in her home?  A woman had her biological clock, while men slumbered.  Her clock however moved her, motivated her activity, regulated  her sleep.  Most women did more than men. 

 

Did you ever notice how busy ants were in June?  They seemed to recognize their limited life cycle. Men considered ants to be pests.  And bosses who made people work faster were pests too. 

 

There was a need of carrots in my life to keep me moving and my horse moving.  In career.  In my intellectual and spiritual life.  I should have come with the label like I saw on the can of soup today:  Best if used by February 2011.  I had been leading a life lately as if I would never expire.  I was starting to pay more attention to those ants.

BUT WHAT ABOUT ME, AL FRANKEN?

 

 

What a mess we were in. All of us. It was on the basis of extreme memory impairment, current psychiatric state, cognitive deficits, the lack of insight and self-understanding. To answer to a larger audience the questions how it was that this country got into the situation it was now in?  Subprime mortgages, with rising food prices would make the issue of the cost of oil soon seem small. 

 

 

Before leaving for Slovenia on Monday George Bush promised that he would stress “our nation’s commitment to a strong dollar.” According to the New York Times, this was “a signal that, with rising oil prices and worrisome inflation, the White House was joining with the Fed in calling for an end to the dollar’s slump.”  He was getting ready to face European leaders increasingly upset about the dollar’s decline against the euro. 

 

 

This Bush promise to “our nation’s commitment to a strong dollar” was as a dramatic a change as any announcement that we would be pulling out of Iraq.  There seemed little attention paid that the devaluation of the dollar was his administration’s way to fund the war without raising taxes. 

 

 

So what was the value of the currency, compared to other nations? Why were some currencies worth more? Why were there currency fluctuations?

 

 

How come my house was worth more than when I bought it?  Or not?  Was it based upon the desires of others of what I had? What were there worries over inflation, deflation? How would they affect my life? And what about tax policy that now ignored the reality of American government spending?  How can you hide a $2 trillion if not $3 trillion dollar cost?  The investigation of the answer seemed a lot like what was going on in France to how many were complicit in Societe Generale nearly 5 billion euro dollar loss, originally alleged against one man, Jerome Kerviel, 31, who was charged with breach of trust, fabricating documents and illegally accessing computers in the Societe Generale scandal.  Coming into heavy criticism for failing to adequately control interns who helped Jerome Kerviel in taking and concealing massive huge-making positions, on June 3, 2008 it was announced that the current boss at the Finance and Investment Bank of the Societe Generale, Jean-Pierre Mustier, would be leaving his duties during the third quarter of 2008.  In private corporations, you did not need to await an election to change the course.  When would the American press begin to pose the question of the financial cost of war?

 

In another story this week, I lived in the state with the worst high school graduation rate of African-American students in the nation.  Poor graduations did not just happen.  There had to be some communal indifference.  Educators were quick to point out this represented a societal problem.  Yet how was it that we led the nation?  What had Abraham Herscehl been quoted as saying about indifference that I had heard of Minnesota Public Radio?  It was something along the line that the God found in the Bible is the parent of humanity and cannot stand viewing the sufferings of others, or letting his well off children view this suffering with indifference. 

 

 

Minnesotans prided themselves in being progressive.  But now the DFL Party, the Democratic-Farmer Labor Party , had nominated a professional comic to be our voice in the United States Senate.  (Full disclosure:  I will not be voting for many Republicans come November 2008.)  I am not sure what Mr. Franken had done to show some form of public service in his life?  I wondered this as I heard a show this morning on Minnesota Public Radio on the state of public education.  One of the speakers mentioned meeting a former governor, Al Quie who, after he left the governor’s mansion, went into prison ministries.  And there he found out how many people in prison were illiterate. There he found people who had been recipients of communal indifference, who had come out of school systems somewhere.  Was this now a lapse of pluralism into relativism where there were no rights and no wrongs? 

 

 

There seemed a connection between Franken’s endorsement and the graduation rate story.  He wrote an article in Playboy that was not now supposed to reflect his beliefs.  It was all about relativism, trying to earn an income yet not pay state income taxes.  And move the kids along.  They are getting big, and bigger, in some cases, than the teachers.  There was no right, there was no wrong.    

 

 

In a world of merging identities, leveraged buyouts, changing identities, a new relativism in a plural society, how could a person, an institution, retain identity with the encroachment of the mass media into a child’s life? How was public policy affecting valuations, financial, moral ones?  How were those with money affecting who got political nominations.  Hillary Clinton was trying to recoup $11 million of her own money before she gets focused again on her Senate career. 

 

 

On the journey how was I changing with all of this?  So what was the difference between actual cash value and replacement cost?  Why did valuations change?

 

SInce politics in the new American culture were now just about opinions, not moral judgments, Al would be a great leader.  He is a man for his times, these days of relativism and money.