Having now gotten through 2 of these, I still have mixed feelings. The story is a really good one, and I love historical fiction and anthropological historical fiction like this, exploring how folks in the distant past may have lived. At the same time, I have to say there are many things about the style so far that are distracting to me.
It may be that the author is a woman, and she writes for a woman’s point of view, but I don’t think that’s all of it. In the second book, you could write an abridged version in about 10 pages or less, and it would be a good story to tell around the campfire. Auel expands that with tremendous detail about what’s happening within the story, but the detail doesn’t always contribute to or enhance the story. In many ways, I feel like she’s speaking in a voice meant for an adolescent girl.
While this is fine if you’re an adolescent girl, it’s distracting when you’re not. I think she could have developed a lot more story, and a lot more meat in the story, for the length of the book.
One disclaimer – there’s a good deal of sex in the story, and at times it’s a bit graphic. Since I’ve never read romance novels or stuff geared toward women, this could be common, but it seemed like quite a lot of emphasis to me, emphasis that didn’t necessarily improve the story (or detract from it). Just another example of something that felt too much like filler to me, and I would have liked more “meat and story”. If you’re the parent of an adolescent girl, you might want to read this before encouraging your daughter to read it. Personally, I have no problem with the way she wrote it as it relates to appropriateness for a 14 year-old daughter, but some parents might not agree with me.
I’ll keep reading these, because I so much like this sort of story. Her writing could mature as she goes through them – I’ll write another opinion after the 4th or 5th book. The bottom line, though, is that the story and the writing is good enough for me to keep reading them, despite the distractions!
Read a post recently that got me wandering down another path of thought. The essence of the article was the author’s belief that we all feel more and more pushed to “have experiences” these days. Katinka’s blog post can be found here, if you’d like to read it.
The idea got me going down that “checkmark” path again. I seem to love that path ever since Dave and I started bouncing ideas about it back and forth.
I agree that there’s a real competitive push in modern cultures today to “do the most and have the most”. The extends into things like vacations, and spiritual experiences.
Let’s start with vacations. When Peggy and Jesse and I were in Vietnam and Cambodia recently, we sometimes encountered throngs of Korean (or other eastern) tourists frantically making their way through a tourist attraction. They had no compunction at all about pushing ahead in a line, which was irritating to me based on my cultural norms, but apparently completely acceptable to their cultural norm.
On the good side of that equation, once they got into a place, they moved quickly, not lingering over anything at all. They were clearly trying to fit as much into the day as they could.
They were “doing” that particular attraction or site. The faster they could “do” it, the more things they could “do” on their vacation. The more checkmarks they could check off their list.
Of course that’s not unique to Koreans – in the west we’re probably even better at it, (or would that be worse?)
We plan our vacations to “do” a thing or group of things. The best vacations are the ones that are tightly planned and allow us to “do” the highest number of things.
Checkmarks.
“Doing” implies activity on my part – I’m putting my stamp on something. I’m happening to something or someone.
In Ha Long Bay, enjoying the company of children laughing and giggling...
Experience is something altogether different, isn’t it? Experience implies something that happens to me, rather than me happening to something. Tiny little shift in words that has a gigantic implication on how we walk along the path of life.
Dave and I have wrestled with this idea a lot in our conversations. On our long-distance cycling trip last summer across Colorado and Kansas, we talked often of motivation to do this sort of thing, and what we got out of it. Recognizing how common it is to feel the motivation to do things to check them off a list.
I get it. The most vehement anti-smoker is the man who quit smoking. I grew up as a “list” kind ‘a guy, and spent my early adult years focused pretty heavily on the checklists. I easily fall off the wagon, and start seeking the checkmarks.
The only thing that keeps me on the wagon most of the time is selfishness. Really. “Doing” a place is me happening to someone or something else. Once I’ve come to experience magic – to have things happen to me – then my selfishness wants to let more things happen to me. Each sip makes me more thirsty to feel more, to take more in, to surrender to the thing.
The tint of the word “selfishness” feels a little different to me in that light. To you as well?
Extend the idea to spiritual experience… I think I’ll post on that next.
Right up front – I’m OK with capital punishment. Society overall does better, and fewer people are hurt, when we weed out folks who cause heinous harm to members of society. That weeding out can include putting the person to death if we deem that’s the only option to prevent them from causing more damage.
In fact, I’m such a fan of it, that I can’t figure out why we don’t start applying it to corporations. This overtly activist and extreme supreme court of ours has decided that our sacred Bill of Rights applies to corporations, so it’s time they start standing up to the same punishments that real citizens stand up to. If a corporation causes the death of a person, they stand trial for that death. If they are convicted of a capital crime, they are disbanded and liquidated as a corporation, with the assets they leave behind benefiting society as a whole.
But that’s another discussion…
Today I want to talk about a particular death penalty sentence – one that appears to represent systemic excesses and corruption in our criminal justice systems.
In 1991, Troy Davis was convicted of murdering a white police officer in Georgia. While there was no physical evidence connecting Mr. Davis to the crime, there were 9 witnesses – enough to allow the jury to convict him. While it troubles me a little that we’d impose the death penalty without airtight physical evidence, I’m giving the jury the benefit of the doubt, and assuming the circumstantial evidence (9 witnesses) must have been compelling.
The problem is, 7 of those witnesses have since recanted in signed affidavits. Most of them have testified that they bore witness only under the duress of police pressure and coercion. Of the remaining 2 witnesses, there is strong evidence that one of them may be the culprit who actually did commit the crime Mr. Davis was convicted of – multiple witnesses have signed statements that he has claimed responsibility. Apparently this man was the alternative suspect at the time Mr Davis was convicted.
I don’t advocate that Georgia let Mr. Davis go. I advocate that their case doesn’t seem to meet the bar we should be setting to allow us to kill someone. Their case seems to have been weak to begin with, and it has since fallen apart completely. In a trial today with today’s information, it seems unlikely there would be a conviction, let alone an execution.
This is where the corruption of the system becomes deadly. Rather than admitting this case is thin, putting the execution on hold until this new evidence can be evaluated, Georgia appears to be pushing full steam ahead to kill Mr. Davis. This is a case involving the death of a police officer after all, and the state needs to make an example out of somebody.
It doesn’t seem to matter to them whether or not the man they make an example of is guilty or innocent.
I submitted again today. It’s really the only choice you have if you want to travel on the commercial airlines. Like sheep being led to the slaughter, we line up and submit to searches that would make a Stalinist or a Nazi proud.
From TSA Website - The actual pictures they see of you are much bigger and much higher resolution.
We do it without complaining, though my contempt shows clearly on my face as I submit. I suspect it’s only a matter of time before I’m pulled into some room for daring to be contemptuous of this sort of fascist behavior, daring to question the authority of my government to force its will on me in its never-ending crusade to rid our country of any danger.
Well, strike that last line. They don’t seem to mind certain kinds of danger at all. They seem perfectly willing to cast ever greater numbers of the poor and desolate into the streets, happy to cut the last vestige of health care safety net from those without money, delighted to use tax dollars to fund private schools while allowing schools to fail in the poorest and most bleak corners of our nation.
It’s not really safety they’re after. It’s control.
I understand how, following 9/11, we had an administration and a congress bent on stirring fear in us, so we’d allow them to impose ever-increasing authoritarian controls over us, and get us to allow them to trounce all over our sacred Bill of Rights. In that soup of fear and growing authoritarianism, we gleefully allowed them to create the TSA – a gang of thugs who search and probe every crevice of our privacy whenever we enter an airport.
I endured the probing and ever increasing authoritarianism. My slightest whimpers at the offenses brought lighthearted comments from my fellow travelers. “I’m just happy they’re protecting us from terroristsâ€, or “I don’t have anything to hide – I’m glad their searching us allâ€. I could only hope that we would evolve past these thugs we’d elected, and get back to a sane respect for our Bill of Rights. Surely, We The People would revolt against this destruction of our Freedoms and Rights, right?
We don’t seem to care.
Today, as I made my way through the lines of gestapo and the strip-search machines, I watched a wretched site. I shouldn’t have watched, but I did.
A young woman – maybe 30 or 35 – had apparently failed the strip-search machine. In my case, I’d been frisked because I left a dollar bill in my pocket. Really, their machine could see the dollar bill in my pocket, and after I took it out, I was manhandled and searched to make sure I didn’t have any other offending dollar bills in my pocket.
But back to this young woman. Attractive and innocent, she’d worn a nice dress. A bit clingy – you could very clearly see the contours beneath the dress. Having failed the strip-search machine, she was going to be humiliated in front of all to see. Helga, (the interrogator or searcher – that probably wasn’t her name but could have been…), was having the young woman strike different poses over the yellow foot marks on the pad, while she ran her hands all over looking for the offending dollar bill (or whatever her offense was).
This was the part I shouldn’t have watched. If you wanted to know what was beneath her dress, all you had to do was look at her – she wasn’t hiding anything. If there was a dollar bill tucked into her panties I could have told Helga right where it was – I could see the lines of her panties, and I’m sure I could have seen the outline of a dollar tucked in there.
The poor girl was humiliated. Helga was feeling her up in public, and she was supposed to feel grateful that we were somehow more secure from bad guys as a result.
I was ashamed. I couldn’t continue to watch, and made sounds of disapproval and disgust as I passed Helga. Fortunately for me, Helga had her hands full, and couldn’t call gestapo buddies to haul me to the interrogation room.
Fellow Americans, when will we all begin to express our disgust at this behavior, rather than continuing to condone it with our silence? We have a budget crisis. How about this – abolish the TSA to save a few hundred billion?
Look, I have no doubt our Nazi style searches at airports make it harder for hijackers to steal airplanes and kill people. But let’s face it, our government loves to cozy up to terrorists like the tobacco industry and big pharma, and big tobacco and big pharma are absolutely killing tens of thousands of Americans each year with the legislation they buy in Congress, yet we do nothing to protect Americans from them. Somehow though, we’re happy to let these idiots in congress spend hundreds of billions and piss our liberty down the toilet in the name of eliminating some risk to airline traffic.
In our sacred Bill of Rights is the 4th Amendment – protecting us from unreasonable search by our government. It was meant to check and stop the power of government to use “security” as a cover for total control. It was meant to force the government to prove that they have some reason to believe that you’re committing a crime or doing something illegal before they’re able to search you in any way.
Really – look it up – it’s one of the founding principles of our nation. When we created the TSA, the federal government slapped the Bill of Rights in the face, threw it in the gutter, then turned to We The People and dared us to say anything about it or do anything to stop them.
When will we say something?
Life is dangerous. Bad guys exist, and do bad things. Hitler did a great job of making his country safer from outside terrorists, but the price was high. I’m one American who’s not willing to pay for a little security with the liberty that so many good Americans have died to preserve.
I’ve had a couple interesting dialogues recently with friends about prayer. In one of these cases, the friend was considering using content from page 54 and 55 of Peace at the Edge of Uncertainty in a sermon he was putting together, and wanted my permission to use the content. In the other case, a good and hearty conversation just got around to the subject.
Prayer fascinates me. People “use†prayer for many purposes. Some of these purposes seem manipulative and evil to me, some more than a little selfish, but for the most part people view prayer as a way to reach out and try to connect with G-d. A truly honorable and noble pursuit.
Prayer might become a much more meaningful part of our lives if we could look at our “prayer behavior†and our motives, and segregate out our uses of prayer in order to make each more effective. I think when we use prayer as a public proclamation of our Faith, we’re generally pretty good at it. When we use it to prove to ourselves and others how righteous we are, I think we’re pretty good at it.
But when it comes to the really deep and meaningful stuff – the stuff where we’re trying to open our soul to a connection with G-d – I think too many of us are intimidated and unsure.
I wonder if the key to connective prayer is to give up the notion of praying to G-d, and instead to view prayer as a simple connection with G-d.
It’s not a message or a request, it’s a connection. One soul connects to the Source Of All, becoming both receptacle and conduit for Divine Energy, creative and healing.
In the early hours of morning I watched as a pair of Bluebirds investigated one of my Bluebird houses. I’ve tried for years to attract bluebirds to my garden, but without success. The habitat is right, the houses are right, but I just can’t seem to get them to nest.
Eastern Bluebird - Image from SmellLikeDirt.wordpress.com
It’s not that I lack for birds in the garden. I have many feeders out for many types of birds, great habitat and protection in the garden, and ponds full of water. I even have some Sharp-shinned and Coopers hawks that feed occasionally on the birds that feed at the feeders.
But I can’t ever attract Bluebirds to my houses.
Until this morning.
I saw the pair investigating the house, and while they flew off a bit when the dog was out wandering in the yard, they stayed close and kept their eye on the house. I had high hopes that maybe, finally, I’d have some nesting Bluebirds to watch.
As I type this later in the day, the pair hasn’t returned at all. Maybe they didn’t like the sound of the English House Sparrows that congregate on the other side of my house, or maybe they didn’t like that a dog wandered in the yard. Maybe the house just didn’t have the curb appeal they were looking for.
But they seem to have rejected my house, and that makes my sad.
Funny how this sort of thing works in my mind. I “want†something, and will go to great lengths to make it so. I’ve admittedly got a pretty strong will, (a character flaw I recognize), and will go to great lengths to force the desire of that will into being.
My will is an extension of my ego, and that ego and its will aren’t always right. It’s one of the deadly flaws of humanity, that we seem to feel deep inside our minds that our will is the way things are supposed to be. It’s how we’re able to create G-d in our own image over and over again.
But I’m pretty sure we’ve got that upside down in our mind. We don’t get to be the decider of the order of things. We’re just part of the order of things, albeit a pretty intrusive part.
I want to watch Bluebirds in my garden, but there’s something about the location or the surroundings of the houses I’ve put out that the Bluebirds don’t like. They’re not rational creatures who analyze their way through this problem with logic – they’re instinctive little guys who’re working from the collective memory of hundreds of generations of Bluebirds before them. And that collective memory and instinct pushes them to look elsewhere after they stop in and gander at the houses I’ve so lovingly and willfully put out for them to consider.
I’ll keep hoping for a pair of Bluebirds to call my backyard home someday. Maybe I’ll try new locations next year. And who knows – they might be back still this year, or another pair might take a look. After all, my realtor friends tell me it only takes the right buyer…
But for today, I’m enjoying the little lesson they’ve helped me see. While I might still want Bluebirds in my backyard, it’s apparently not what they need right now, and maybe not what I need right now either.
After all, you can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, I hear you might just get what you need…
As we go through the process of searching for ways to cut money from our national budget, we should be doing some soul-searching as well.
You can watch the political parties lining up with their masters and pets, trying to focus the effort on the places where they want the budget cut. To do this, they need to demonize and dehumanize the people who they want to cut funding from.
One side wants to cut funding and “pork†that goes primarily to the wealthy class in our country. They look to move the taxpayer dollars toward those on the lower end of the income scale, and away from those on the upper end. In addition, they target defense spending as the best place to reduce cost.
The defense industry argument is an easy one to make – I’ve written before about the amazing money we could save if we cut our defense spending to twice as much as the next biggest defense spender in the world – $600 – $700 billion a year. It’s staggering.
But there’s a human side to that. Defense contractors are the biggest “welfare recipients†in the nation, and when they get that taxpayer money, they pass some of it on to their employees in the form of jobs – often really good jobs. These people who have these jobs aren’t demons and crazies. They are (for the most part) good people – often hard-working people – trying to get by and do a good job.
As we cut the defense industry’s “welfare†ticket back, many of those good and hard-working folks will be out of a job.
The other side wants to cut funding for any programs that move money toward the middle or lower classes in the country, while retaining programs that continue to benefit the upper class. They typically demonize the waste in government programs like Medicare and Social Security – these are the places they want to make the big cuts.
But there’s a human side to these cuts as well – much easier to see. While there is surely waste and fraud in any bureaucracy – be it Medicare or Defense contracting – there is also a great need among the poorest “class†in our country. As we cut these programs back, those with the greatest need will feel the greatest pain.
These people aren’t demons and crazies. They are (for the most part) good people – often hard-working people – trying to get by and do a good job.
The budget has both a revenue and a spending side. Both sides need to be addressed. On the spending side alone, as we pound the table with our strong opinions about who we should be cutting government funding for, let’s do our best to understand clearly what those cuts mean, who will be hurt by the cuts, and what that pain will look like.
Even when we hold strong opinions about who should receive the biggest cuts, let’s try and see the real people who will feel the pain of the cuts. Let’s see the good within those people, rather than demonizing them.
The same logic holds true for cuts to overseas programs that the government funds, or cuts to outreach programs in churches, temples, and mosques. It’s even more stark in those cases, as the recipients of the help often look much different than we do, and live much differently than we do. It’s much easier to not see and understand those more distant people, and much easier to see only the bad things about those people.
We’ve all got good and bad within us, right? We’ve all got things we’re proud of, and things we’re ashamed of. When we look at someone else, we need to recognize the same holds true for them. We choose whether we’re seeing the good or the bad in that person.
Until we see the good in a person, we’ll not be able to provide real and meaningful help, or find real and meaningful solutions. We’ll not be able to open the Giving Circle.
Mahatma Gandhi believed every single act was important. He suggested once to “think of the poorest person you have ever seen and ask if your next act will be of any use to him.â€
In a world where we’re generally evaluating each act on its ability to help us gain more power, wealth, or comfort, this is an interesting twist of perspective.
Or am I wrong about that? Maybe we don’t evaluate our every act to determine how it might help us gain more power, wealth, or comfort. Maybe the majority of our actions “just sorta’ happen†– without much thought.
Of course, a psychologist would probably argue with me that our unconscious mind is, in fact, doing some level of evaluation before we act – that beneath the most (apparently) mindless act is some level of measurement and decision. The scales used in that measurement and decision-making are often hard to fathom, having been built up over our lifetime to serve some hidden set of scale-masters.
Makes sense. After all, we’d be crippled by analysis if every single little thing we did needed to be analyzed before we could act.
But what if…
we were just a little more thoughtful in our process? What if more of our actions did involve a conscious effort to predict who will benefit from that action? And just as important, who will be hurt by our action.
Having now gotten through 2 of these, I still have mixed feelings. The story is a really good one, and I love historical fiction and anthropological historical fiction like this, exploring how folks in the distant past may have lived. At the same time, I have to say there are many things about the style so far that are distracting to me.
