To make Comments write directly to Jim at jimt@quixotic.ca
7
Jun
2017
Road re-construction seems to me to bear distinct parallels to the way churches, political parties, and community organizations operate.
Most social reconstruction follows the “pave it over” model. The old road – the old beliefs, the old ways of doing things, the tried-and-true constitutions and policies of the past – continue to exist under the fresh new face. Or policy.
In churches, the kind of organizations I know best, this means that a 2000-year-old pre-scientific-age text continues to underlie all major decisions. Creeds almost as old remain untouchable.
Similarly, political parties elect new leaders, lay out new platforms. But old prejudices and ideologies still lurk just below the surface.
Occasionally, though, some groups try to start from zero, like building a new highway. But they first have to clear away any broken components of the former road. They have to dig deep to establish root principles. They have to expand that foundation with layers of interpretation.
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: roads, organizations
5
What would I have done? The question haunts me.
Last week, three men were stabbed after they intervened on a commuter train in Portland, Oregon, to stop a white supremacist from harassing two young women, one of them wearing a head covering.
It seems the women were not doing anything objectionable, other than riding a public train. But the stabber started yelling racial insults and profanities at them. The three men tried to stop him.
Now two of them are dead, and one still recovering in hospital.
And so I wonder, what would I do? I like to think I would do the noble thing, the honorable thing. I like to think I would have stood up for common decency.
If so, would I be dead now?
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: Portland, stabbing, Michael Dowd, Lizard Brain, Higher Porpoise
31
May
Okay, God, I apologize. In the past, I have occasionally argued that you don’t intervene in worldly events. I have even suggested that you cannot intervene to fix things down here.
I was wrong. I must have been. Because Dan Rather writes in his Facebook blog, “I end each of my days with a silent prayer for my country… I hope against hope as I slip off to sleep that our rapid descent into governmental chaos has hit a nadir -- only to awaken to a new set of incoherent tweets or explosive headlines. I pray again that our Constitutional government, the great gift of our Founding Fathers, will provide a safety net to catch us before everything we hold dear is no more…”
If a famous news anchor like Dan Rather believes you can do something about the state of the world, who am I to disagree?
Tags: God, Dan Rather, intervention, prayer
28
Sorry, there’s no opinion column today. My brain cells went dead this week. Not that there was nothing to write about. Trump’s performances in the Middle East and at NATO; the election for a leader of the Conservative party; Okanagan Lake rising to record levels; two men stabbed to death for defending a couple of Muslim women on a train in Portland, Oregon; the governor of Texas jokes about shooting journalists; the Manchester bombing – there was ample fodder there.
But nothing jelled. Yet.
Fortunately, a number of letters about last week’s column are worth passing on.
Tags:
24
Your average termite is a stupid creature. It's a whitish grub. It has only rudimentary senses; it can't really see where it is going. It can do only two things -- crawl and chew.
But put a number of termites together and they will immediately start to build a home for themselves.
The mound that emerges is astonishingly complex. And the termites do this with no direction. No blueprints. No planning.
No one termite – especially not even the queen, who is little more than a living ovary -- has the intelligence to direct this construction. None of the termites knew what they were doing when they created it. But it is unquestionably real.
Nancy Ellen Abrams calls this an "emergent" phenomenon. It derives from the collective activity of those termites. But it is not them. It is more than them.
Tags: God, Ants, termites, emergent, transcend