Christmas Lights - Streets on Fire

Well, it's Christmas time again and the annual competition is underway. I don't participate in this annual tradition as much as others. This year, we didn't put any lights outside at all - simply no time. It's been hectic every day the past few months. We just decorated inside a bit. Put up our two trees. One for the living room in the front and one for the family room in the back.

But many of my neighbors have gone to their usual lengths to impress with lights and decorations. One neighbor has a 4-car garage and uses fully half of that to store his Christmas decorations for the rest of the year when he is not using them. He has a Christmas tree in every room, and each one is themed with different nostalgic Christmases of the past including decorations he has accumulated over his lifetime. In one front window he has an illuminated robotic Santa waving his arm at passersby. If you look closely at the photo, you'll see him in the center window on the second floor.
Outside, he has an 8-ft tall gingerbread house filled with stuffed toys arranged in a tea party inside. He even has a working train on tracks and gives small children a ride around his front yard in it! Have a look and see what I mean...









And then there are the miniatures as well. Here you see another neighbor that, every year, converts half his garage into an elaborate Christmas scene of a miniature town. It is perhaps 12 feet long, and 6 ft deep and raised to be displayed on an angle, as if the town is built on the side of a terraced hill. He sets it up to be viewed through the windows of the garage, then even provides a lighted pathway across his lawn with lit handrail guides to usher visitors from the street to his window to view. There are easily 50 buildings in his amazing miniature Christmas village, each is perhaps 10 or 12 inches wide, and they include esoteric structures such as a drive-in theater, movie theater, Krispy Kreme donut shop, and even a Ford car dealership complete with a showroom including a little red '57 T-Bird on a working turntable, along with the churches, houses, hotels, and shops and stores and gas stations, etc. There is even a little skating pond with actual tiny skaters skating around in little circles. It is truly remarkable.





One trend which seems to be becoming popular in the last few years has been huge inflatable yard decorations. Giant 10-ft tall Santas, and huge Teddy Bears. And then, this year, we are seeing a new item in abundance. Giant snow globes complete with blowing snow inside. Simply amazing.



I took my daughter and some of her friends for a little drive to see the lights and sights Friday night. Included here are a few pictures from our trip around the neighborhood. As well as a couple pictures of our own Christmas trees.
This is one of my own in a warm little Christmas corner of my family room.


Merry Christmas to all!!
Val

Truckstop Christmas in 1960

Here I go again. I do love a decent Christmas story. So what if I am sentimental.
I got this in my email from my brother today, written by a woman in Indiana and her experience one Christmas in 1960.

The Big Wheel
In September 1960, I woke up one morning with six hungry babies and just 75 cents in my pocket. Their father was gone. The boys ranged from three months to seven years; their sister was two.

Their Dad had never been much more than a presence feared. Whenever they heard his tires crunch on the gravel driveway they would scramble to hide under their beds. He did manage to leave $15 a week to buy groceries. Now that he had decided to leave, there would be no more beatings, but no food either. If there was a welfare system in effect in southern Indiana at that time, I certainly knew nothing about it.

I scrubbed the kids until they looked brand new and then put on my best homemade dress, loaded them into the rusty old 51 Chevy and drove off to find a job.

The seven of us went to every factory, store and restaurant in our small town. No luck. The kids stayed crammed into the car and tried to be quiet while I tried to convince whomever would listen that I was willing to learn or do anything. I had to have a job. Still no luck.

The last place we went to, just a few miles out of town, was an old Root Beer Barrel drive-in that had been converted to a truck stop. It was called the Big Wheel.

An old lady named Granny owned the place and she peeked out of the window from time to time at all those kids. She needed someone on the graveyard shift, 11 at night until seven in the morning. She paid 65 cents an hour and I could start that night. I raced home and called the teenager down the street that baby-sat for people. I bargained with her to come and sleep on my sofa for a dollar a night. She could arrive with her pajamas on and the kids would already be asleep. This seemed like a good arrangement to her, so we made a deal. That night when the little ones and I knelt to say our prayers, we all thanked God for finding Mommy a job.

And so I started at the Big Wheel. When I got home in the mornings I woke the baby-sitter up and sent her home with one dollar of my tip money-fully half of what I averaged every night. As the weeks went by, heating bills added a strain to my meager wage. The tires on the old Chevy had the consistency of penny balloons and began to leak. I had to fill them with air on the way to work and again every morning before I could go home.

One bleak fall morning, I dragged myself to the car to go home and found four tires in the back seat. New tires! There was no note, no nothing, just those beautiful brand new tires. Had angels taken up residence in Indiana? I wondered. I made a deal with the local service station. In exchange for his mounting the new tires, I would clean up his office. I remember it took me a lot longer to scrub his floor than it did for him to do the tires.

I was now working six nights instead of five and it still wasn't enough. Christmas was coming and I knew there would be no money for toys for the kids. I found a can of red paint and started repairing and painting some toys. Then hid them in the basement so there would be something for Santa to deliver on Christmas morning. Clothes were a worry too. I was sewing patches on top of patches on the boys pants and soon they would be too far gone to repair.

On Christmas Eve the usual customers were drinking coffee in the Big Wheel. These were the truckers, Les, Frank, and Jim, and a state trooper named Joe. A few musicians were hanging around after a gig at the Legion and were dropping nickels in the pinball machine. The regulars all just sat around and talked through the wee hours of the morning and then left to get home before the sun came up.

When it was time for me to go home at seven o'clock on Christmas morning I hurried to the car. I was hoping the kids wouldn't wake up before I managed to get home and get the presents from the basement and place them under the tree. (We had cut down a small cedar tree by the side of the road down by the dump.)

It was still dark and I couldn't see much, but there appeared to be some dark shadows in the car-or was that just a trick of the night? Something certainly looked different, but it was hard to tell what. When I reached the car I peered warily into one of the side windows. Then my jaw dropped in amazement. My old battered Chevy was filled full to the top with boxes of all shapes and sizes. I quickly opened the driver's side door, climbed inside and kneeled in the front facing the back seat. Reaching back, I pulled off the lid of the top box. Inside was whole case of little blue jeans, sizes 2-10! I looked inside another box: It was full of shirts to go with the jeans.

Then I peeked inside some of the other boxes. There was candy and nuts and bananas and bags of groceries. There was an ham for baking, and canned vegetables and potatoes. There was pudding and Jell-O and cookies, pie filling and flour. There was a whole bag of laundry supplies and cleaning items. And there were five toy trucks and one beautiful little doll.

As I drove back through empty streets as the sun slowly on the most amazing Christmas Day of my life, I was sobbing with gratitude. And I will never forget the joy on the faces of my little ones that precious morning.

Yes, there were angels in Indiana that long-ago December. And they all hung out at the Big Wheel truck stop...

Please note: These photos are not of the people or places mentioned. They are merely meant to illustrate the story.

The Mystery of How The Pyramids Were Built

In 1989 I visited the world’s most famous pyramids on the Giza plateau just at the edge of Cairo, Egypt.


What the pictures never show you is that there is a plaza with restaurants and parking and city streets, etc. directly in front of the pyramids. The edge of the parking lots come almost to the edge of the Sphinx. Of course, you never see that in photographs because people always either stand in that parking lot itself taking pictures of the pyramids from the eastern side so that you do not see the city of Cairo in the background (that is where this picture was taken from), or else they take the road through between the two larger pyramids to another parking area just south of them (to the left in the picture above) and take pictures facing north, which also excludes the city.
If you have never been there, you might think they are far out in the middle of the Sahara, because all the photos make it seem so by showing nothing but desert sand all around.

Not everything is known about who made the pyramids and why or even when. Most Egyptologists believe that they were built by the early Egyptians during the earliest times of the Old Kingdom, around 2478 BCE based on alignment with the stars as they were at that time. That would make them about 4500 years old now. There are some who believe they are much older, however, and they have their theories to support that.
The Sphinx is much older than the pyramids and built by another civilization that pre-dates them. There are no hieroglyphics showing the construction of the Sphinx, and so experts assume the Egyptians found it there as it is. But they disagree widely on the exact age of the monument. In fact, some experts think that the Sphinx is about 8,000 yrs old, others think it is 15,000 years old, and some even believe the Sphinx could be as old as 55,000 years and made by a culture that pre-dates all other cultures known to date.
Clearly, by the erosion on it’s body, the Sphinx was built before the seas which once covered all that part of northern Africa. During a major climatic change, those earlier deserts were covered by seas, possibly during a great flood, and then the Earth changed again and the seas were gone and the deserts were uncovered again but now revealing the effects of the water on the Sphinx. The Earth went through two major changes in the lifetime of that monument.

The Mystery
There is a mystery surrounding the question of how the pyramids were made. The problem is that the stones used in building them are not found locally, but rather were created 100 miles away up the Nile in a quarry discovered north of Cairo. The problem is that the stones are huge and heavy, and difficult to transport at all, let alone that distance. When I was there, the tour guide (An Egyptologist with a PhD) told us that the stones mostly weigh about 115,000 lbs. That far exceeds the capacity of carts, etc. of that time.

Possible Suggestions of Others
Some thought that the stones were pulled by ropes over rolling logs. If you saw the classic epic film, The Ten Commandments, with Charleton Heston, then you would have seen how they could have done this. The slaves pull on the ropes and the giant block slides along the rolling logs, as it leaves behind the last logs, the slaves quickly pick them up and lay them down on the road in front of the block so that it can roll on them again.
There are three main problems with this approach:
1) If they are trying to roll the logs on sand, the weight of the stone would grind the logs into the sand and bury them, and they would stop.

2) If the road is hard enough to allow the logs to roll, then the weight of the huge stones would easily crush the logs

3) There are very few trees in that area to get wood from. When I was there, there were only a very small number of palm trees – and they do not have a high-strength hardwood trunk with bark. They are basically tall plants - softer than softwoods. They would never do. The only other trees I saw in all the Mediterranean were olive trees, and they are short, soft, and bent in wild shapes – not suitable for creating long straight logs to roll the blocks along.

Others have suggested that the stones were floated down the Nile on boats, but that presents other problems:

1) A boat can only hold the weight that it can displace in the water without breaking a seal. It is highly unlikely that boat-building at that time would allow a weight of that magnitude to be brought on board and sustain it for a single trip let alone multiple trips.

2) They would need to have built some sort of crane to load the stones on and offload them from the boats. They lack the materials or the engineering skills and knowledge to build such cranes.

3) Even if they did use boats, the Giza plateau is not beside the Nile river. They would still need some method of moving them across the land from the Nile to the worksite at Giza which is many miles. So that puts us back to the problems of the first solution.

Others have suggested everything from Druidic magic to Alien spacecraft, however, I think I may have a solution that seems more likely.

My Suggested Solution
I think the easier solutions are the best, and when I got to the pyramids I looked at them for a while, studied them from all angles, and then thought to myself, “If I were the Pharoah’s Chief Architect, how would I do it?” Then the answer came to me for the way I would approach this.

I believe we need to change how we think about the stones themselves. We have assumed all along that they were quarried in their current form in the quarries up north and then brought down here as they are.

But I would have simply carved them not into blocks, but rather into the shape of cylinders – and rolled them from the quarry to the work site. This could be accomplished with holes in various places along the surface and wooden pegs inserted to create handles that the slaves would pull and push on, and the pull out the handles and put them in the next holes, and so on as the stone rolled. There is evidence of long ramps leading up to the pyramids to the top level as it rose, as they were built. I believe they rolled the stone up the ramp to just before the place where it will rest. Then, the stone workers would chop off a piece to make a flat side, the flip it over onto the flat side resting in place. Then they could simply chip away all the rest of the rounded portions to leave it as a flat-faced stone. In fact, that would allow them to make the stones fit together and match so well – because they were carved in place to match each other in height, length, depth, etc. Also, the excess stone rubble that was chipped off could be added to the ramp to help build it higher so the next level of stone could be rolled into place at the next higher level.

This solves a number of problems. It allows for the lack of wood, it allows for the ability to not crush the wood under it’s weight, the larger circumference allows for it to roll over sand without burying itself, and it explains where the material came from to build the ramps strong enough to hold all the stones during construction.

So there you have it. That is how I would have done it, had I been there at the time, and so that is how I think they did it. The simple solution works best, I believe.

Naked Art

Most guys are hard-pressed to find a way to get a woman naked. Let alone getting two women naked. Let alone getting them naked outdoors!

Well, here is a man who has found a way to get THOUSANDS of people naked and outdoors and posing for pictures. Most are average-looking people, some are attractive, some overweight, some too skinny, some old, lots are young, but it’s quite a mix.

Meet Spencer Tunick. A 36 year old artist from New York City who has made a name for himself by creating temporary art by having thousands of naked people lie on top of each other on the ground outdoors in familiar public places in various cities around the world.

Imagine the sales job he must do to get people to take their clothes off and bare all in public, in the cold. And they receive no money. They only receive a copy of the picture. This is worth understanding the motivations for. These people cannot be recognized really, because mostly only the ones right up front can actually be seen anyway. So why do they do this? Is it for the sake of the art?

In his art, the human form, taken in aggregate, is used to create a substance, a surface material which is laid down upon famous outdoor locations to create an effect. It is not about sex. The figures are not posed in sexual positions or sexual acts. This is genuinely about art. The advantage of having nude bodies is that it is about humanity rather than clothes, and also, they are all more or less the same color – which means more attention is given to texture and detail rather than color.
Still, I wonder. Where does he find these people? Or where do they find him? Is it that as an artist, you struggle to find enough to make one art portrait. Then after that people see you are a serious artist and they suddenly start lining up to take off their clothes for you? Also, I am curious about erections. How do the men avoid that embarrassment? Given that it’s probably unavoidable in the proximity of lots of naked women (some of whom may be touching you or lying on you even…) That would be a problem for me, frankly. I could not control that, and I couldn’t hide it either!

Here's a question that occurs to me: What do they all do with their clothes while they pose? If four people take off their clothes and go for a skinny dip together, finding their clothes later is no problem. But what about when it's 5,000 people?





Body Painting
And then there are other types of art using the body. Body painting seems to have taken on a real popularity in recent years. Here are just a few samples of this art form. Consider that these people often walk around in public places totally nude, but painted this way, among other normally dressed people. They become a work of art themselves. This is common in New Orleans, especially during Mardi Gras.

There is an interesting psychology around this. What does this tell us about our concepts of privacy? Or public morals? Is ‘art’ merely an excuse to get naked and maybe get laid? No. I don’t think so. The art aspect of this seems to be taken too seriously for that. Besides, there is porno all over the web. It is the largest business on the web now. If people want sex, the opportunities for nudity and sex, etc. are plentiful there. No – this seems to genuinely be about art.

How interesting. I guess I approve of it and accept it as art. ….as long as MY daughter is not part of it that is!!!!

Overcoming Hate

I believe that hatred between people, or groups of people, is based on ignorance of each other.

Think about how you make a friend.

All friends start out as strangers. But then one person shares something personal with the other. Then, the other responds in kind by sharing something personal back. If the level of sharing stays at that level, then they remain friendly acquaintances. But if it continues deeper, so that the sharing escalates into sharing deeply personal thoughts and feelings and fears of each to the other, then the friendship deepens. The two become close friends. A type of love develops. This is because we are all worthy of love. By sharing ourselves we show our “love-worthiness” to another, and they show theirs to us.

You may not agree with all the actions of a stranger. But when you take the time to truly understand them, and understand what they feel and understand what motivates them, then you begin to understand why they do what they do. And you can find forgiveness.

Sometimes we are simply overcome by events and the best intentions go awry, but a true, deep understanding of the other will withstand a lot of troubles. When you have invested significant time and energy and effort into a relationship, you care for the other person’s welfare, and they care for yours. This is friendship.

The opposite of friends are enemies. Typically, enemies are people who don’t know each other well. They don’t know each other’s mind, so they don’t understand their needs, fears and desires, therefore they don’t understand their motives, and therefore don’t trust their actions.

In the TV series called "Star Trek: The Next Generation" there was an episode about a highly renowned negotiator called Riva. He was called upon to settle the dispute between two warring factions on a troubled planet. As he walked into the briefing room on the way to the planet, the crew of the Enterprise started to give him an explanation of what caused the war and the basis of the disputes. He stopped them.
He said something similar to this: “This war has been going on for over 100 years? Then I don’t need to hear what originally started the war. Your facts will say that it is over some disputed piece of land or such, but by now that has become irrelevant. It has carried on too long. By now it has become personal. They hate each other personally, and the only way to fix that is to find some common shared goal that they each want to strive for and work toward. We must forget the past and work toward that future.”

I think that is a wise insight toward how people hate each other, and how to fix that, but I also suggest the idea of getting to know each other better. On a personal level. Truly understanding each other at a level that allows one people to see the other not as some demonized group, but as people, like themselves. People with similar hopes, dreams, fears. Sting once wrote a song in the midst of the cold war of the 1980’s called “Russians Love Their Children Too” . That’s it.

In February, 2006, Steven Spielberg will be trying a project to encourage peace in the middle east between the Israelis and the Palestinians. He will buy 250 video cameras and he will split them into two groups. He will give 125 of them to Israeli children and 125 to Palestinian children. Each group of children will videotape their daily lives and make a film of how they live. They will show their friends and relatives, and they will talk about what it is they want and their hopes and fears. Each will pour their personalities out, not to each other, but to the camera. To a piece of art. A film. Then Spielberg will take the movies made and swap them, giving the Palestinians’ movies to the Israelis, and vice versa.

I think this is an excellent, highly commendable act. I love the concept of this project, and I am very impressed by Spielberg for thinking of it and putting it in place. THIS is how you eventually solve a 100 year war. Not with missiles. Not with rhetoric. Not even with enforced “tolerance” of each other – but with understanding. To understand someone truly and deeply is to see the goodness and the worthiness in them. That is how you overcome hatred. That is how you make a friend. And THAT is what is needed.

Overcoming Terrorism

Most Americans seem to think the cure for terrorism is to gather our army, navy, air force and marines and launch a massive military assault. That is like trying to stop a flood by shooting guns at the water. It’s simply the wrong tool to use.

Before we talk about what might work, let’s take a look at what doesn’t work and what wouldn’t work and why - so we know which paths to avoid.

Direct Military Force
This is what we are trying to do in Iraq at the moment. The basic plan is this: we send a trained, equipped army into a hot zone where terrorists are attacking, and we try to force them out or capture them and arrest them and take them away to terrorist prison. (Where we have been apparently occasionally guilty of torturing the prisoners)
With this method, we cannot see the enemy clearly. They are not a standing army with an established country or area we can find and overtake. Yet that is what our army is trained and equipped to fight against. Strategically and tactically, an army needs to fight another army; a large, militarized, visible target.
But terrorists do not present that visible target. They hide. They operate covertly in small pockets, and they can effect a huge amount of damage collectively. The American and British forces had no problem overcoming Iraq’s established military at the outset. Iraqi forces were conquered and dispersed within the first few weeks with minimal casualties on the American side.
However, now, in the fight against the terrorist insurgents, we have lost over 2,000 soldiers, and the losses continue almost daily, and there is no real end in sight. Despite our superior numbers and superior technology and superior firepower, we cannot seem to get the upper hand here. All our wins are small and temporary. And there have been many incidences of collateral damage where we have burned innocent citizens to the bone with white phosphor agents during night raids in Fallugah, killed families on either side of our intended missile targets, etc.
As our presence is prolonged and as it hurts more and more civilians, we seem to build more and more resistance. We are not capturing the hearts and minds of Iraqis. Instead, we seem to be alienating them. As we capture or kill 10 terrorists, there are always 12 more to take their place. This seems to be an ongoing battle that we can never win.

Indirect Military Force
In a traditional military direct confrontation, the terrorists have the advantage. They can hide in the mountains, in the villages, among innocent civilians, etc., while our forces are exposed, obvious, and in the line of concealed fire. If you want to level the playing field, we could get nasty. You can choose to fight using their methods. For example, you could analyze their motivations, and use them against them. Let's examine what makes a suicide bomber want to commit suicide:

1) He is fighting what he believes is a holy cause. America is evil and we are all infidels in their eyes, and he is convinced it is his religious moral duty to destroy us.

2) He is young, has not yet built a life he is afraid of losing, so ideology is bigger to him than practical day-to-day necessities.

3) His current life has no joy, no comforts, few chances for employment, poverty, no hopes for the future. So death seems almost a relief for him. A heroic death seems very worthwhile.

4) By performing the suicide bomber mission, he earns $25,000 paid to his family on his death. So they are better off, and he dies a hero in the eyes of his family, his friends, and his countrymen.

5) By doing the suicide bomber mission, he feels he will earn a hero’s reward in heaven. An afterlife of luxury and ease and 72 virgins for his sexual pleasures, etc.

And so the young men (most are teenagers), are going to continue to sign up for duty.

If you wanted to fight fire with fire you could undermine their confidence and remove their incentive to continue doing these things. Although they might be temporarily effective, here are some nasty examples of terrible things that we should NOT do:

1) Kill the families of the suicide bombers. This way the incentive of providing for their families is lost. Also, it turns their families into fugitives that have to run and hide for the rest of their lives. That would eliminate the revered martyred hero aspect of becoming a suicide bomber.

2) Destroy – or threaten to destroy Mecca – the Muslim holy place. The theory here is the same one they used on attacking the Twin Towers in New York. Find a place the enemy values – something at the heart of what they care about and destroy it. Individuals may be willing to give their lives to a military cause, but the threat of this alone might be a huge disincentive for them to do anything that threatens America, and therefore threatens the heart of the holy state of Islam.

3) Launch a nuclear attack and level the entire cities where a large degree of terrorism abides, and a way to neutralize the immediate threat and serve as a deterrent to other potential terrorists. It's amazing how many people think this is a viable alternative.

4) Gather up the remains of suicide bombers and bury them wrapped inside a pig or hog's skin. This would cause them to think they will not go to heaven and will not collect their rewards in the afterlife.

The problems with taking these approaches is that,

1) They are immoral, and against our ideas of what is right and wrong.

2) They reduce us to the level of terrorists ourselves, and we would deserve whatever punishment would be meted out to us after that.

3) It would make the entire Muslim world rise up against us – if not the entire world. We could not possibly win against the whole world. We are 300 million people against a planet of 6 billion people. We would be utterly destroyed. And frankly, we would have become so evil by those deeds that we would probably deserve it.

4) The effects of controlling their aggression would only be temporary at best.

5) It would probably serve to escalate covert acts of terrorism here in the US.

6) To give any degree of security to Americans at home, the government would have to turn the entire country into virtually a prison, with guards all along the coastlines and borders, and military checkpoints everywhere on all the major roads and railways, etc.

So we can’t effective use either direct or indirect military force to win out against terrorism. Both these approaches are ineffective and take us in the wrong direction.

So, What Might Work?
Before we can defeat terrorism, we must define it.

I think of terrorism as a disease. It's a disease of civilization, and it arises from problems of inequity and lack of communication and lack of political will to bring justice and fairness to everyone.
Where you have some group that feels completely disenfranchised, and without the hope of reprieve, you have the emotional fuel for terrorism. When they finally have access to weapons, that is the spark that ignites the flame.

Terrorism is desperate, but it is not insane. There is method in the seeming madness of their actions. This is not the nonsensical ravings of a lunatic, these acts are the calculated actions of desperate people who feel they have no other choice. No other means to have their story heard and their plight improved. Terrorism is a disease, and so it must be treated and cured.

And treating the symptoms will not cure it, we must act upon the underlying causes.

I think it is futile to try to police and control a large group of people that truly and seriously want to destroy you so badly that they are willing to sacrifice their own lives in order to achieve that goal. Even if it is within our power to control them temporarily, it only means they will bide their time until they build up their strength enough to overcome us.

And have no doubt about it - we CANNOT stay there and fight this war indefinitely. As of today, the cost of the war in Iraq is $225,132,197,484 and counting higher by the second. Here is a website that actually shows the running cost of the war in real-time:

http://nationalpriorities.org/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=182

This has already gone far beyond our comfort level, and our resolve as a country has already eroded to the point where only 30% of the population are in favor of staying and that is dropping daily.
At this rate we will have to abandon efforts there before too long, or it will completely bankrupt the country. The only thing keeping us afloat right now is the injection of large doses of cash from China, Korea, and Japan to levels over 2 billion dollars every single day. And they are complaining they are losing out on that investment, and so will not continue that subsidy indefinitely either.

And so the answer is NOT to try to control the terrorists militarily, but rather look at their fundamental motivations and work at that level.

What makes the Muslim world hate America, and how can we change that?
Well, for one thing, they see us as an arrogant, power-mad, greedy nation that survives by exploiting and abusing those people with less power. Specifically: them.

How can we change this perception?
Well, let’s look at recent history. Think back to the tsunami last year. The countries in southeast Asia like Indonesia, etc. suffered the most. They happen to be the largest Muslim population in the world. They have many times the population of places like Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, etc.. As it happened, Australia gave 800 million dollars in aid to the Tsunami victims. They are a small nation of 20 million people. America gave less than 5% of that amount even though we are 1500% larger and we are the wealthiest nation in the world.

What if, instead of spending over 1 billion dollars per week on the war in Iraq, we instead spent a fraction of that amount on helping out Muslim countries that are struggling with major disasters, etc.?
If we became the friend of Muslims the world over instead of the enemy, then how would the terrorist leaders muster the will of the people to fight us and give their lives doing so? They would find it hard to get enthusiastic recruits to sacrifice their lives fighting a country that helps them and their people and saves their lives through humanitarian acts. How could they continue the perception of us as evil if we are doing so much good.

If we re-tooled our military machine into a helping force rather than a fighting force, we might just be able to build enough good will around the world to undermine the methods of our enemies to find a fighting force that opposes us at every opportunity.

And we would be moral, just, and deserving of a place at the table as true leaders of the world. And isn’t that what we like to think of ourselves as now? Isn’t that who we thought we were? Isn’t that where we want to be?

Couldn’t we just be the good guys again?

Possible Arguments and Questions:
Q: That’s too simple. And it’s an oversimplification of the problem. How could something so simple work?
A: Because simple answers work best. They are the easiest to communicate. They are the easiest to accept. And it is not an oversimplification of the fundamental problem. They hate us because of how they view us. They view us that way because of our policies and our actions. If we change those self-serving policies and actions to benefit them, then that will undermine the platform of hatred against us. They will stop looking for ways to harm us, and instead welcome us. Eventually. It will of course take some time and some gestures of goodwill on our part to engender that trust.

Q: But we need wars to stimulate our economy – to get us out of our recessions each decade, we need a major war.
A: The only reason a war brings us out of a recession each decade is because of the enhanced government spending. We pay taxes into a government pool which is used to fuel tremendous government spending in times of war. They buy weapons, but also vehicles, fuel, food, building materials, software, computers, technology of all kinds in every field, etc.
If we change over to a helping force rather than a fighting force, we could spend the same money to enhance the economy, but in different areas. Subtract the fighter jets, nuclear subs and bombs, and instead add power substations, cell phone networks, clean water facilities, food, transportation, communications facilities, schools, building materials, healthcare medicines and other needed supplies, etc.
The government can still stimulate the economy by spending, but instead of the military-industrial complex, it is other industries. But they all hire people and provide jobs. The employment and lifestyles improve and it radiates out to the rest of the economy in waves. And we get the added bonus that once they are on their feet again, they have had a sample of our goods and our lifestyle, and so now they become customers of our companies, thereby increasing our recovery again through new business and exports.

Q: But we would end up giving away too much money in aid and that hurts our economy.
A: No. We are ‘giving away’ too much money right now on war. It’s costing a horrendous amount of money, and we receive nothing back for it. The spoils of war are never equal to the cost anymore. We don’t need the real estate. With giving aid, it’s dramatically cheaper than war, it builds goodwill throughout the world, undermines the case for terrorism against us, and promotes future business with the countries we help. It leverages our investment in so many ways - all of them good!
War could never give us such a good return on our dollars!

The Tablecloth

Normally, I write all the posts here myself, but this arrived in my email today, is apparently a true story, and it struck me in such a way that I just wanted to share it, and save it here.

The Tablecloth
The brand new pastor and his wife, newly assigned to their first ministry, to reopen a church in suburban Brooklyn, arrived in early October excited about their opportunities. When they saw their church, it was very run down and needed much work. They set a goal to have everything done in time to have their first service on Christmas Eve.
They worked hard, repairing pews, plastering walls, painting, etc., and on December 18 were ahead of schedule and just about finished. On December 19 a terrible tempest - a driving rainstorm hit the area and lasted for two days.

On the 21st, ! the pastor went over to the church. His heart sank when he saw that the roof had leaked, causing a large area of plaster about 20 feet by 8 feet to fall off the front wall of the sanctuary just behind the pulpit, beginning about head high. The pastor cleaned up the mess on the floor, and not knowing what else to do but postpone the Christmas Eve service, headed home.

On the way he noticed that a local business was having a flea market type sale for charity so he stopped in. One of the items was a beautiful, handmade, ivory colored, crocheted tablecloth with exquisite work, fine colors and a Cross embroidered right in the center. It was just the right size to cover up the hole in the front wall. He bought it and headed back to the church.

By this time it had started to snow. An older woman running from the opposite direction was trying to catch the bus.. She missed it. The pastor invited her to wait in the warm church for the next bus 45 minutes later. She sat in a pew and paid no attention to the pastor while he got a ladder, hangers, etc., to put up the tablecloth as a wall tapestry. The pastor could hardly believe how beautiful it looked and it covered up the entire problem area.

Then he noticed the woman walking down the center aisle. Her face was like a sheet.. "Pastor," she asked, "where did you get that tablecloth?" The pastor explained. The woman asked him to check the lower right corner to see if the initials, EBG were crocheted into it there. They were.

These were the initials of the woman, and she had made this tablecloth 35 years before, in Austria. The woman could hardly believe it as the pastor told how he had just gotten the Tablecloth.

The woman explained that before the war she and her husband were well-to-do people in Austria. When the Nazis came, she was forced to leave. Her husband was going to follow her the next week. He was captured, sent to prison and never saw her husband or her home again. The pastor wanted to give her the tablecloth; but she made the pastor keep it for the church. The pastor insisted on driving her home, that was the least he could do.. She lived on the other side of Staten Island and was only in Brooklyn for the day for a housecleaning job.

What a wonderful service they had on Christmas Eve. The church was almost full. The music and the spirit were great. At the end of the service, the pastor and his wife greeted everyone at the door and many said that they would return. One older man, whom the pastor recognized from the neighborhood continued to sit in one of the pews and stare, and the pastor wondered why he wasn't leaving.

The man asked him where he got the tablecloth on the front wall because it was identical to one that his wife had made years ago when they lived in Austria before the war and how could there be two tablecloths so much alike. He told the pastor how the Nazis came, how he forced his wife to flee for her safety and he was supposed to follow her, but he was arrested and put in a prison.. He never saw his wife or his home again all the 35 years in between.

The pastor asked him if he would allow him to take him for a little ride. They drove to Staten Island and to the same house where the pastor had taken the woman three days earlier. He helped the man climb the three flights of stairs to the woman's apartment, knocked on the door and he saw the greatest Christmas reunion he could ever imagine.

True Story - submitted by Pastor Rob Reid

p.s. - I'm always a sucker for a good Christmas story...

Yes... But Is It Really "Art"?

Once, years ago, I was left waiting in someone’s kitchen while she had to go take a phone call. I sat looking around at the room, and noticed they had decorated in a colonial country-kitchen style.

Next to me was a wall with wallpaper that had repeating patterns of a picture of a barn, with trees around it, stacks of hay, and an old tractor. Also on that wall was a framed painting of a barn, with trees around it, stacks of hay, and an old tractor. Basically the same elements, but slightly different in a few ways. She probably thought it made sense to decorate to a consistent theme like that.

I looked at this and it struck me that essentially both of these things were paintings of the same subject matter, from a slightly different angle, and yet one was considered “art” and worth framing, and yet the other was merely decoration and only suitable for mass reproduction, and pasted to the wall as background. What was the difference? Was it mere chance? Was it simply that one artist was commissioned to paint a depiction of a farm scene specifically for wallpaper pattern, and the other was intended from the outset to be a framed painting? Is that the only difference between art and decoration? Expectations for how it would be used?

No. That’s not it. There IS a difference.

I looked at the scene in the wallpaper. It was accurate, detailed, well-positioned, good perspective, good balance, etc. Nicely rendered. But it seemed meaningless. It was somehow "empty".
I looked closely at the scene in the painting, and found that in this case, it conveyed more than just the physical shape and sizes and colors of the objects in the picture. In this one, I could tell that it was early afternoon. I could feel the warm sun and a lazy air that felt like I had lots of time left in the day to do what I needed to do, and I could afford to spend a little time looking through the barn. Maybe I could walk over to that tractor and climb into the seat and wonder who the men were who sat in that seat over the years. What they thought about in those long hours out in the fields by themselves. I pictured an old farmer driving hour after hour looking down the rows he was cutting and thinking about his life. The choices he made, the ones he didn’t make. Trying to plan and strategize for the future. Worrying about whatever the current problem was. I looked at exactly where the tractor was sitting and wondered, “Did he park it there deliberately? Or is that just the last place he turned it off and never got around to moving it out of the way – not realizing at the moment he turned the key to off that it would stay in that exact position summer, fall, winter, and spring, for the next 50 years?”

The difference between the wallpaper version and the framed painting was that the painting conveyed a message. And it conveyed an emotional state. And that, I think is the key to art.

In my opinion, if it conveys a message, especially a message with emotional context, from the artist to the audience, then it is “Art”. If it has no message, if it does not say anything to you, then it is merely decoration.

What is the goal of the artist, if not to express that which is in their soul, and communicate that to others? Paintings, sculpture, music, poetry, fiction, photography, etchings, glasswork, computer graphics, cinematic film, acting, dance, etc. These are all means for one soul to speak to other souls through various mediums.

And an artist can usually see the message of other artists on several levels at once. A true artist can listen to music and see the picture in a song. They can look at a painting and hear the music that lives in the picture. They see the dance in the sculpture, and the poised sculpture in the midst of the dance.

I believe that within each of us is an inner being, a soul. It is that which animates us. It is the difference between seeing a person who is alive and thinking, talking, moving, walking, and the corpse of that person once their lifeforce has left them. It is definitely there, it is completely obvious to an observer, but you cannot see it in a microscope. Trying to see the soul of a person by examining their body through a microscope, is like dismantling a radio to find the music. The music plays through the radio, just as the soul plays through the body. The physical body is the medium through which the soul exercises it's intent.

When a person is very intelligent, we say they are “very bright” or even “brilliant” - like a light that is strong. When we see an especially talented person, we sometimes call them a “star”. Again – another form of very bright light.

So I think of our "light" as being our soul, our intelligence, humor, personality, knowledge, logic, insight, love, caring, emotions, despairs, our fears, hopes and dreams.

When I write and record music, I am investing a part of my light into it. It is that which animates the music and gives it life – in the hopes that doing that will make it “art” and not merely decoration. I suggest the term “decorative music” is music that is put on in the background while you are doing something more important like talking, or eating a meal, or shopping in a store, or taking an elevator ride. It is something that does not command a person’s attention. It does not speak to them or convey an emotional message – it merely helps to set the ambiance of an environment like the temperature, or the lighting, or a pleasant fragrance, etc. It is sonic wallpaper.

When a person creates “art”, they are sharing their “light” with the world. And this is why, in the case of all my music albums, I have named them using the word “light” somehow in the title. And the specific use of the word light is related to the nature of the music within that album. Since the music is a sharing of my light, the title reflects that. Here are examples:

Early Light Volumes 1 and 2: These albums are my earliest works. I think of them as being in the very early light of dawn of my musical life

Morning Light: This album was a little later, the music is still early in my music career, but by now the light is a little more clear and the day is defined.

Moonlight: This album is about dreams. The first song is about waking from a dream but later finding you merely woke up into another dream. Moonlight captures the whole nighttime drama of all the succession of dreams I go through, like an adventure.

Inner Light: Here an attempt to express my inner feelings about various things. A variety of thoughts and feelings expressed in a variety of songs.

Instrument Lights: These are instrumental songs, Here I want the audience to pay particular attention to the light I have invested in the guitar solos, or inter-connections between instruments, or subtle layerings of different rhythms, the resonances between instruments, etc.

The Light of Sun and Moon: This is about the complimentary opposites of day and night. Joy and sadness. Daylight and moonlight and things that exemplify each. The front cover has a daylight scene, the back cover has a moonlight scene.

Light ‘em UP!: This is a high-energy rock album intended for the 101st airborne stationed in Iraq. I do not support starting the war there, but I do support the dedication, sacrifice, and general professionalism and sense of honor of the men and women that accepted their assignments and went to put themselves in a dangerous situation to complete their duty. This is about the light that shines within those kinds of souls.

Natural Light: This one is an acoustic album. Acoustic guitars have a natural, wood-based sound that brings out the natural clear light within. It touches a clean, pure place within us.

Soft Lights: This is an electric band sound, and it has energy, but it is more refined than most rock. It has a smoother, softer, sound. A more sophisticated, cosmopolitan sound. It suits a smooth jazz radio station format, though it is not all jazz songs. There is a feeling that I cannot express in words very well, but I have expressed it here in this music. I cannot define the music precisely. In this case, the music defines itself.

So those are my ten albums to date. My body of musical work. 105 songs. They represent the investment of my inner light and energy and whatever skills and talents I may have picked up or developed along the way.

You have a light within you. As a human being, you have thoughts and feelings that you could share. If you develop the techniques for one of the artistic mediums, you can create art and share your light as others have. No one says you have to earn your living from it to be an artist. You simply have to create something that contains a bit of your spirit. Push something positive out into the world, and let it see the light of day.
Give someone else a piece of your light. You never know when something you say or express will give someone else the hope and strength to keep going, or it may be just what they need to hear to get through a troubled time, or to achieve a great thing.

The world is often beautiful and wonderful, but sometimes also a dirty, ugly and painful place. The more art we can create, the better we can make it for everyone. I hope that you can find a way to express the light within you, by making your own art.