Tues Ten 082509: Slow Things

I’m exercising a bit of economy today with this post because I’ve just finished the most profound article I think I’ve read in a while. Something I saw on Twitter yesterday prompted me to begin my original Tuesday Ten post as a semi-rant on things I hate reading in 140 characters or less. Actually, they were just things I hate reading, only made more annoying by their dumbed down, misspelled, or speed edited 140-character summaries. The headliner? Trashing your kids or your husband to your 1,637 followers! Holy Badmovimous, Twatman! If you can’t say something nice…

Of course, I was faced with a conundrum because to write the Tuesday Ten post that leaped from my Tweetdeck screen would mean violating one of my own personal social media rules: It may be sarcastic or annoyed. It may be fed up or fatigued. But, in the end, it better be positive. Ix-Nay on the post about Itter-Tway.

Then, I read this article from the August 22 Wall Street Journal by John Freeman (actually found from a link on… Twitter). The poignant sound of Mr. Freeman’s name–Free. Man.– was not lost on me as I read “Not So Fast”, his treatise on the value of slow communication. He certainly seems free from the “Tyranny of Email”, the apparent title of his upcoming book related to the article.

So, for economy’s sake, I decided to write today’s post as a Tuesday Ten and Most Interesting Phrase Paragraph of the Week (MIPOTW) all rolled into one. How very efficient of writer Haley.

Mr. Freeman’s absolutely on-target thoughts about the drawbacks of the hyper-communicative world we’ve created made me want to sit down for a moment. Hopped up on bandwidth with 140 (or so) characters at our disposal and a thousand “Joe Bloes” listening, we’ve become so enamored of the outflux of information that we are less mindful of what we’re really saying–and even less attentive to what really matters. Is that progress?

In an article full of interesting phrases and paragraphs and concepts, Mr. Freeman’s idictment of the internet is that:

“It has encouraged flotillas of unnecessary jabbering, making it difficult to tell signal from noise. It has made it more difficult to read slowly and enjoy it, hastening the already declining rates of literacy. It has made it harder to listen and mean it, to be idle and not fidget.”

His recommendation? Spend more time in the slow lane.

“If the technology is to be used for the betterment of human life, we must reassert that the Internet and its virtual information space is not a world unto itself but a supplement to our existing world…

Given that our days are limited, our hours precious, we have to decide what we want to do, what we want to say, what and who we care about, and how we want to allocate our time to these things within the limits that do not and cannot change. In short, we need to slow down.”

With that in mind, I give you a new and improved, more progressive Tuesday Ten: Ten [wonderfully slower than dial-up] Things I’ll never get from the internet.

1. A spit-kiss from a preschool boy

2. A glistening glass of sweetened, iced tea

3. Crumbs on my shirt from the warm sweet roll I just baked

4. The smell of a library book

5. An early Fall breeze

6. Freshly folded clean clothes

7. Sweaty, dirt-filled giggly faces in need of a wet washcloth

8. Conversation with chocolate sprinkles on top

9. The chance to hold the hand of the one I’m listening to

10. Baby Girl’s first steps accompanied brothers’ cheers.

MIPOTW: Giant Leap

On July 20, 1969–40 years ago, today–Neil Armstrong became the first man to step onto the surface of the moon. To call his words the Most Interesting Phrase of the Week is almost laughable in its understatement. According to NASA’s timestamped transcript, Armstrong’s legendary statement was only a small sound byte in a lengthy and mission-focused dialog. I suppose stepping outside of the already precarious confines of a spacecraft that has just been planted on the surface of the moon wouldn’t leave much time for waxing poetic–though history confirms the power of his statement in it’s sheer simplicity. With the world watching…

109:23:38 Armstrong: I’m at the foot of the ladder. The LM footpads are only depressed in the surface about 1 or 2 inches, although the surface appears to be very, very fine grained, as you get close to it. It’s almost like a powder. (The) ground mass is very fine. (Pause)

109:24:13 Armstrong: I’m going to step off the LM now. (Long Pause)

109:24:48 Armstrong: That’s one small step for (a) man; one giant leap for mankind. (Long Pause)

109:25:08 Armstrong: Yes, the surface is fine and powdery. I can kick it up loosely with my toe. It does adhere in fine layers, like powdered charcoal, to the sole and sides of my boots. I only go in a small fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch, but I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine, sandy particles.

109:25:30 McCandless: Neil, this is Houston. We’re copying. (Long Pause)

As the sun sets later and we look up at the lunar “lesser” light ruling this night, I’ll probably try to wrap my mind around the experience of seeing the “Earthrise” for the first time–an image we too easily see as commonplace. And, I will say to myself, “Man. ON. The Moon.”

Remarkable.

(Photos courtesy NASA.gov)

MIPOTW: Hate

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity”

It’s a phrase from a poem called “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats, and it could easily be my Most Interesting Phrase of the Week. Except, it’s a mere fragment eclipsed by my more aptly acronymed Most Inspiring Post of the Week–MIPOTW nonetheless. It wasn’t inspiring in the warm, fuzzy, chocolate-covered, rainbow sort of way (although, yeah, rainbow is somewhat applicable). It was inspiring in the “please don’t let me be lumped in with the best who lack all conviction” kind of way. Let me join the extraordinary in matching word for word, passion for passion the intensity of the worst.

The post was written by my friend, Polly, author of Lesbian Dad. (Although we probably don’t actually know one another well enough to be more than acquaintances, I’m hedging my bet on friends.) Prompted by the hate-fueled shooting at the Holocaust Memorial Museum this week, the piece chronicles some of the recent hate crimes and acts of domestic terrorism perpetrated by the “extreme right wing” that may or may not have graced the 6 o’clock news. It offered, in particular, a very moving story and comments about the nature of hate — a story ironically set in my own home state where those supposedly of my own faith played an infamous role.

Polly wrote of a visit she and her wife made to Mississippi in 1995 to visit and interview two women (lesbians) who founded a “folk school and retreat center” in the southern part of the state. The story of Wanda and Brenda Hensen and the sheer harassment they endured stopped me in my tracks. Stopped me because I was not reading a history or social studies textbook about the 1950s and 60s. I was reading a testimony not even 15 years old. Sadly, I can read (as Polly did) the same testimonies, the same stories on every news website I encounter. The names are different, some of the issues are different, but the hate is the same.

Polly rendered this account of her visit to Mississippi:

Of that afternoon, two things stay with me most. First: these women were the embodiment of lives lived in absolute, direct contact with everything they believed in, and it was inspirational. Second: Wanda told of an incident in nearby Hattiesburg. They were well-known in the area, and when one particularly vitriolic man recognized her on the sidewalk, he wanted to spew an epithet at her, but was at a loss as to what to call a white lesbian.  ”You– you– you damned faggot!” he told her. “You damned n****r!”  Tough as nails, she wasn’t fazed. But she was bemused by what happened in his mind. And careful to point out that he went to the place where all his hate resided.  It mattered not that she wasn’t a gay man, or that she was white.  His hate, in that moment, felt all the same to him.

I was struck by the profound, but simple notion that hate is all about the hater. The object really doesn’t matter–doesn’t matter in the sense that it’s interchangeable. John Bradford’s phrase, “there but for the grace of God” go I, comes to mind. As LD so movingly reminded me, none of us are immune to the hater’s short view:

Our multiplicity, the utterly inextricable, tight weave of the various parts of our selves ramifies in every direction. We are able-bodied until we are disabled; we are young until we are old; we are free of tragedy and hardship until we are struck with them.

A shift in economic position, a religious conviction, a post written, a person befriended, a left turn into a different state, a marriage or divorce, the simple act of existence–any of these or countless other facts may now or might one day draw the ire of the hater. For surely, a hater seeking something to hate will always find it.

Describing the end of her visit, Polly wrote:

The beloved and I stayed hours later than we planned, talking to the Hensens past sundown.  And as we drove back to our friends in New Orleans that night, in our city-slicker Honda with the out-of-state license plates and the rainbow sticker, we looked at each pair of headlights in the rear view mirror with a keen attentiveness.  Scared, because of stories we’d just heard (particularly of rage at the “element” from outside the area that Camp Sister Spirit had drawn).  But also grateful, frankly, for the lives of ease we were driving back to.

Yes, all lives of ease are easy right up until they come into the headlights of hate. As I wrote to Polly, reading this post partly made me want to phone up and personally apologize to countless folks who’ve been the recipients of fellow “believers” and countrymen gone awry. No, gone awry doesn’t really cover it. I suppose I truly mean those who’ve made me cringe, who I think have misrepresented the Jesus I follow, those who have done wrong in the name of right. But, I must admit that desire at it’s core is self-centered. It seeks to distance myself for the sake of myself, which is probably ok on some level, but, frankly is too small a viewpoint. It’s a viewpoint I’m not sure we can afford in this world of passionate intensity. While it may surpass the lack of conviction of the “best”, it doesn’t reach the extraordinary requirements of matching hate with equal love and a little more love to tip the balance. I’m working on that.

Please read the post in its entirety: “The worst are full of passionate intensity” I’m not doing it justice.

MIPOTW: Conversation

This installment of the ever-acronymed Most Interesting Phrase of the Week comes from the post Dana Rudolph wrote over at Mombian.com about my piece for “Blogging for LGBT Families Day.” I’ve already extoled the joys of the experience, but this quote from her article seems particularly on-target well beyond gay marriage and LGBT issues.

It is easy, in these days of rallies and ranting, to get the impression that change happens for those who shout the loudest. That sometimes works, but more often, I think, change happens in these quiet conversations.

Deep-rooted change happens through conversation–equal opportunity conversations with those near and far. There is a lot of shouting in our culture, a lot of shouting in our media, in our politics, in our social debate, in our entertainment. Sometimes, there’s a lot of shouting in our workplaces and homes. Shouting is most often about being heard, not about hearing. It has the illusion of talking to, but is really talking at. Conversation can’t exist without hearing. When you remove listening from the equation, conversation turns into monologue. Get enough monologues going on at the same time and each one starts to out-volume the other in competition for the final word. Yes, there’s a lot of shouting in our culture, and not nearly enough quiet conversation. In the quietness is where we find God and where we find each other. I’m ready to start looking.

MIPOTW: JK+8

This week’s Most Interesting Phrase of the Week comes from an article I ready by Marybeth Hicks in the Washington Times. Mrs. Hicks is the author of Bringing Up Geeks, the book she generously sent me to read and review a few months back. I’m really enjoying it, and I must say that she gives me quite a few “duh!” moments in her common-sense approach to parenting and the media. [stay tuned for Episode 1 in the Geeks R Us MeMyBook&I series next week!]

The article was in response to the TLC/Jon & Kate Plus 8 hullabaloo that’s been brewing over the last few weeks.  In it, Mrs. Hicks talked about the vital role a marriage makes in the heathly, stable lives of children and how deceptive it is to try to separate the marriage relationship from parenting responsibilities. She noted Jon & Kate’s verbalized commitment to their children’s “happiness” and their desire to put the children first. She concluded with this statement and the question I’m determined to ask myself:

“In the end, Jon and Kate face the same question that every married couple confronts as they work to maintain a strong and healthy bond: What will they give up in order to have what they say they want most of all?“

Sacrifice. It’s not an easy concept to get behind. But, like the merchant seeking fine pearls, I have to come to the place where what I desire for my family, my children and myself becomes more valuable than the substitute or temporary satisfactions standing in my way.

MIPOTW caveat: Mrs. Hicks’ “growing fungus of celebrity” comment ran a close second here. Well-said.