Blasting The Past

It used to be, that if you really needed help, your neighbors would start arriving in a steady stream, bringing soup, crackers, and relentless good cheer.

If you were a real jerk of a neighbor, you'd be told "You're a jerk, but you're our jerk."

If you were a private person with personal space needs about the size of Montana, your objections would be brushed aside.

(A really nice representation of how this still works in Hmong culture is found in Clint Eastwood's last film, the superb Gran Torino.)

Somewhere along the line, though wires got crossed. Personal boundaries became the 'in' thing, as did setting limits. Concern became prying, help became enabling. Pop psychiatry began its relentless march to power, and our society fragmented.

Why? My theory is that the changes that took place in Western society after the two great wars of the 20th century set the stage for a fundamental change - for the worse - in how we view ourselves, and those around us.

World War One, with its horrendous death toll in the trenches, produced what we remember as a 'lost geneeration' of writers - talented and influential young men and women who moved the the Left Bank of the Seine (le rive gauche), in Paris, and wrote about how patrician society had let down the world. It was true enough to tug the heartstrings, and simple enough to be adopted as a credo by young people in the late 20s and 30s. We read Stephen Ambrose, and think of the WW2 generation as being infused with patriotism, and something of a martial spirit - but that came after Pearl Harbor. In the 30s pacifism was popular, and America First was a very appealing watchword.

World War two brought about another kind of change. Women and minorities entered the military and industry in huge numbers, and there was no way they were going back to the prewar restrictions. It was a positive change, that let individuals, and our country, take advantage of the full human potential that had been largely wasted before - but it broke more bonds with the formal and structured life that had begun the century.

And in the 70s, the chickens came home to roost. People like Benjamin Spock, who'd come of age under the twin influences of the Great Wars, decided to change society by deconstructing what we had. Gone were the paternalistic, conservative values of respect for elders and authority, and to the fore came...

ME!

The ME generation began in the 70s, and it hasn't ended yet. Ahead of everything - courtesy, neighborliness, marriage vows, whatever, came individual preferences. Not rights - that was implied, that you had a right to anything you wanted. What you wanted was important.

And most young people - for this was aimed at the young - wanted personal freedom, and no personal responsibility.

They'd never get sick, so they'd never need chicken soup. And if their older neighbors got sick, well, "not my problem, dude - later!"

And we lost something precious, and I suspect we have no idea how to get it back.

Myths About Writers

Most people have a set of preconceived ideas about the personality and life of those who write novels. Here, then are certain myths, exposed as false...or true!

• Writers are rich - the best way to make a small fortune as a writer is to start with a large one
• Writers are chic and stylish, with long flowing hair and designer clothing - this is largely true, though swave and deboner might be a better description
• Writers have great sex lives - my characters do, but you don't get to read about it, as I respect even the privacy of paper people.
• Writers are literate - true, and I got good at grammer cos I went threw grammer school twice, and now I know how to use all them fancy commas and stuff, and them perspirational frazers
• Writers are well-traveled - I know all the good night spots in Duluth and Yreka
• Writers are arrogant - it's the silly little people who buy our books, who say this
• Writers only have to work half-time - and you can choose which twelve hours of the day you work
• Writers base their characters on their friends - what friends?
• Writers are perfectionists - yeah, whatever, as long as get the word count, and I'm done
• Writers keep cats - no one keeps cats...cats keep people, and that is as it should be
• Writers watch PBS - Big Bird is my hero!
• Writers are inspired by classical music - very true...can't write without "Surfin' USA"
• Writers are reclusive - would you want to hang with someone who might base a character on you, and then have that character eaten by a ferret?
• Writers love to write - writers have to write, to afford the cheap beer the love to drink
• You, too, can be a writer! - take a cold shower, sit down, and call your psychiatrist. NOW.

Does this resemble anyone you know?

Casting Mountains

Jesus said that if we have the faith of a mustard seed, nothing would be impossible - that we could order a mountain to be removed into the ocean, and we'd be obeyed.

So why don't we see mountains being summarily excised from our landscape?

Simple. We don't have a mustard seed's faith, and none of us ever will.

A mustard seed has perfect faith. It is secure in the knowledge that, given the right circumstances of soil, water, and sunlight, it'll grow.

We don't. In everything we do, we always have the serpent of doubt. It was planted in our souls a long, long time ago by the Enemy, and the whole of history - and our potential - after that point has been changed, and diminished.

Most of us have probably tried. We've looked at a mountain, or even a rock, and told it to go jump in a lake. It didn't, and we felt a tinge of disappointment.

In our best moments, we can almost rid ourselves of the serpent's presence, but until we reach the point where we put on Christ permanently, the enemy's presence will always be lurking in the recesses of our faith, waiting for the slightest opportunity to trip us.

Those 'almost perfect' moments in our lives are more common than we think. They're marked by coincidences that aren't statistically possible, and by events that help us, for which we have no explanation.

Miracles, to put a name to the face we see.

So could one of these miracles coincide with the trial we made, to get the mountain to go to the sea? Maybe, somehow, possibly?

No.

The attempt we made, even if it was in one of our spiritually purest moments, even if the doubt was gone, was doomed to failure, because in it, we put God to the test. That's a major no-no.

The miracles we go receive, the answers to our prayers that do come, are granted us for the things we really need - or, more precisely, for the things that God needs for us.

When He needs you to start tossing mountains, He'll let you know.

What We Owe Our Dreams

The last five days were tough. Today was the worst.

After writing through the night, I saw my wife off to work, walked the dogs, and then collapsed. Pain exceeded tolerance, and I had to check out, I guess. Flower Pot, one of the Pits, stood watch over me until I came back to the world of the conscious.

All I wanted to do was curl up and try to ride the waves of pain and nausea until I washed up on some solid shore.

Instead I got up, and started cutting metal for another small part that will eventually go into an airplane.

I've been asked, and ask myself, why? I'm not going to live to finish the thing, let alone fly it. So why not write when I can, and put on a DVD or doze when I'm done writing? Why chase down the dream of flight, and use up the energy I have left?

I guess the answer is that I want to remain true to what I was, and to the dreams that sustained me through most of my life. To say they defined me is a bit much - I used to think that, but one's personal definition is a lot more complex.

But they did make a lot of days fun. And I owe those dreams - and the self I was - my best effort. Even when I'm spitting up blood.

Seriously?

I saw a New Age book in which it was claimed that the salvation of mankind would come from a group of spirits from a planet orbiting the Pleiades.

They told the author, "We're from the Pleiades!"

Oh, WOW. Like, groovy, man.

The Pleiades, in case anyone's forgotten, are a group of stars (sometimes known as the Seven Sisters). They look as if they're quite close together, and in cosmological terms, they are - the cluster has a radius that ranges from 8 to 43 light years.

And the seven stars visible with the naked eye are the tip of the iceberg - there are many more in that area. (About 1000, and people with exceptional eyesight can discern up to 14 visible starts.)

The area in which the Pleiades reside is BIG. Stars are big, and they're heavy. They have a pretty tremendous gravitational attraction, and they tend to be pretty far apart. Like, billions to trillions to quadrillions of miles. (For reference, the Earth is 93 million miles from the sun, and Pluto, the outer sentinel of our solar system, is about 2 billion miles away.)

The area which the Pleiades occupy has a radius of 46,900,000,000,000 - 2,520,000,000,000,000 miles. Better pack a lunch.

The Pleiades look close together because they're so far away. In reality, any planet 'orbiting' them would have a long, cold ride through its year.

New Age is pretty unconvincing anyway, but throwing in astronomy that's side-splittingly hilarious does things to its credibility that are not repairable.

And these people have a hard time believing in Jesus????

Silent Thunder

Living our faith is hard.

In much of what we do, we get feedback - from our spouse, from our boss, from our friends.

But God rarely writes anything on our Facebook wall. We have faith, and live in that faith, but there are times when it feels like a tightrope walk through the fog. We can't see where we're going, or where we've been.\

The fall below us may be lethal, or we may be a foot off the ground.

So a lot of us decide to push the issue, just a bit, and live our faith out load. We drop names and actions, interspersing our conversation with Scripture the way Churchill use to use Shakespearean tags to impress visiting Americans.

If we can't impress God enough to make him give us a pat on the back, we're perfectly happy impressing one another, and maybe we can even get a hug!

There's an innocent charm to this, because what we're saying is "Daddy, look at me!"

But we're not children any more, and we're expected to put away childish things.

We have to know that the fastest action lies in perfect calm, and the most thunderous noise in silence and stillness.

We have to accept that the most perfect rescue lay in the desolate abandonment Jesus felt on the Cross - because it was not only Christ who was delivered from the last enemy.

We all were. Greatness writ in the silence.

Miracles

Some people say that 'physical' miracles are impossible, since they by definition violate the laws of physics.

On the surface that looks convincing, especially when a renowned scientist says it. I mean, a scientist should know, right?

Partly true. A scientist should know...better than to say that.

The fact is that we don't know the laws of physics. We have mathematical models that describe how the physical world that we can observe works. These models are validated by applying them to a large variety of events. But they are still our invention.

Newtonian mechanics ("every action has an equal and opposite reaction") works quite well in describing the arc of a thrown baseball, or the flight of a rocket to the moon. But when you go faster - much faster - the model breaks down. Close to the speed of light, Newtonian mechanics goes into the dustbin.

Did you know that as you get up to that speed (about 186,000 miles per second) time actually slows down? And an objects length is reduced? This really happens - it's been measured.

It was first suggested by a patent clerk named Albert Einstein. Riding a streetcar, he tried to imagine what would happen as the speed got close to light speed. From this, Einstein developed the Theory of Relativity.

Relativistic mechanics works beautifully in describing the physical world. We can use it to describe a baseball's path, or the movement of a photon (a 'packet of light'). the reason we don't use it for everything is that it's really, really complex - and Newtonian mechanics works well enough for all practical purposes, for the thing's we're interested in.

But relativity is still a mathematical model, and there are areas where it breaks down, and becomes inaccurate.

And that means that we really don't know what's happening. The real physical laws still elude us, and they probably always will.

To say that a miracle is impossible because it violates physical laws only means that we can't reconcile it with the equations we have. Nothing more than that.

To say anything more is an act of belief, that in fact there do exist laws that preclude the miracle. We just can't see the laws, or prove their existence. But we believe they exist.

In other words, to say that a miracle is impossible is just as much a statement of faith as saying one is possible.

So, yes, a scientist should know better...or when it comes to their 'faith' do they abandon reason?

Hmmm....