Building Walls.

When the violence between Israel and Hamas was renewed at the end of last year, I decided that I needed to understand. I know that there are thousands of years of history that have led them to this point. Failed treaties; ignored agreements; violent acts committed by terrorists rather than governments, but bringing the organized retaliation of a government. Anyway, I decided that I needed to understand, so I bought Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid by Jimmy Carter, in hopes that the president of my birth could help me out. And I feel that after reading this, I do understand, at least a little bit, why it is that this is so, so difficult and so long-lived a conflict. But really for me the most difficult part of it was the building of the wall between Israel and the West Bank, separating people from family members, and business enterprise, food and clothing, supplies, gasoline, electricity.

And then I read an article in the New Yorker about Mumbai, in the wake of Slumdog Millionaire. The children who live in the slums of Mumbai, like those portrayed in the movie, live off of what they can find to sell, what they can find that's edible. They die from preventable diseases, and have a rate of malnourishment equal to that of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. All of this with burgeoning business and tourist enterprises within reach, but blocked by walls of concrete topped with barbed wire and broken glass.

This brings me to our border fence. We read each week about new violence in Mexico, how the cities are not safe and it's spilling over into the US. We continue to build the fence to keep out the poverty we have forged that we must now keep on the other side of the wall.

We go to great troubles to separate ourselves from the disastrous world our greed and selfishness and prejudice has wrought. We create refugee camps and resettlement plans rather than find ways to forge a lasting peace. We create vast networks of homeless shelters and food pantries rather than creating affordable housing and assuring that every person is fed as they should be. Walls are no substitute for justice.

A New Decade.

And so I have begun my third decade. This is not something I had been looking forward to, but really I'm enjoying year 3-1 so far. Most of my friends in NYC are older than me and passed this mark at least a couple of years ago. They have told me that everything is better after 30...not as much pressure, a sudden feeling of being a bit more self-assured, and maybe finally crossing-over to adulthood in the current climate of delayed growing up. And while I will miss being able to say "No...I'm still in my 20s," and the feeling of accomplishment that I've always felt at being younger than most everyone in my classes or at my various jobs, it's probably okay. I'm no longer advanced. I'm just normal now.

And now some highlights from the last year of my 20s:

• Made my first trip abroad, going to London for a friend's 30th birthday. And I managed to come back without an accent.
• Made a trip to San Francisco for the wedding of one my dearest.
• Got my nose pierced, as I have wanted to do since I was like 18. Don't tell my dad.
  
• Got another tattoo and shared my first one with a friend. Her husband has almost gotten to the acceptance phase.
  
• Made some wonderful (and certainly lifelong) friends.
• Helped elect a president. I still get a little overwhelmed when I see the pictures from this election, and think about what this meant, and could mean, to so many people.
  
• Learned a bunch of stuff...in books, and facts, and life.
• Have come to the conclusion once again that NYC, you and I, though sometimes you bring me down, are in this for the long haul.
  

The Blogs I Would've Written.

Over the past couple of months, I've thought to write several possibly good blogs, but am working like 8 days a week, so yeah...I haven't gotten around to it. So without further ado the list of blogs I would've written had I not had so many jobs.

(1) A blog entitled, The Girlification of Casey B., titled after for some reason The Emancipation of Mimi, Mariah Carey's first album coming off of crazy. This was to be about the fact that I had stated in my 29th birthday blog that this would be the year that I would become outwardly edgy, but think that I have done all I can (tattoo--check; piercing--check; funky-ish haircut dyed slightly red--check; having begun and ended an undefinable relationship with a man my parents would soooo not approve of--check, check and check). So I decided this might be the year I allow myself to be slightly girly instead. I'll let you know how that goes.

(2) Eat, Pray, Love. A birthday gift from a dear friend, and the most recent book for me to have a love-hate-mostly-love relationship with. I'm seriously ashamed of how much I love this book. It's also part of #1, as it is by far the most female-centric, non-feminist book I've ever read.

(3) An exposition on the reorganization of a non-profit, because it wasn't making a profit...and the subsequent laying-off of myself and my other part-time colleagues. (This is the 2nd job. No need to panic.) And the oddity of working for the people who laid you off, so they'll be covered until they can find someone to replace you.

(4) A small discussion of the resignation of my governor. For some reason, the thing that bothered me the most about it all was the image of his wife standing stoically by his side while he humiliated her by telling the world that he spent tens of thousands of their dollars on other women. The government will recover, but I doubt that his family ever will.

(5) And my new favorite web site, Stuff White People Like. It's funny, 'cause it's true.

I've got a bunch of other stuff brewing. Hopefully, it won't all come out in list form. Peace out.

Norman Mailer.

On Saturday night, as I was starting my shift at job #2, I opened up the New York Times for a quick glimpse at what had happened as I slept the day away. I was very sad to find that Norman Mailer had passed away. He is the author of one of my favorite books, The Gospel According to the Son, and one of the most interesting people I've ever held audience for. I saw him speak last winter when he was promoting his book The Castle in the Forest. His writing was seen as revolutionary for the way he portrayed war in The Naked and the Dead, making him a part of the new movement of creative non-fiction. I feel like people like him don't exist anymore. People assured enough to write the things he wrote, such momentous material with such confidence. To run for the mayor of New York on a secession ticket. To (allegedly) head-butt Truman Capote.

The Freezer.

On one of my favorite episodes of Friends, Joey is reading Little Women and when it begins to get too sad or too emotional, he runs and puts it in the freezer. I am currently in desperate need of a freezer. I am currently reading A Thousand Splendid Suns, the second book by Khaled Hosseini, who wrote The Kite Runner (another freezer book). With The Kite Runner, I was brave. I was reading it with my bookclub, and so had support for the read. I saw one of these friends at a birthday party while we were reading it and he came up to me and said, "I finished reading the book last night. I was sobbing for the last 100 pages. Be forewarned."* So I was prepared. When reading on the train, I would begin to feel that something bad was going to happen, and would just shut the book and stop reading. I would begin to read the book on my lunchbreak, and had the luxury of an office door to close when I began to weep. Even my most stoic friends have been affected by this one. So I know I'm in good company.

This weekend a friend loaned me A Thousand Splendid Suns. He said, "It's good, but watch out."* So I gathered up my courage and put it in my bag to read on the train. During day one, I saw the approach of something bad coming, but I turned the page and.... I should've known. But now I'm fully rapped up in it. There's no sparing myself. I began reading again as I ate my lunch today. It went a little something like this. Oh, how wonderful. Things are looking up..... Booo. That shouldn't happen..... Oh, but wait..... Are you kidding me..... He's alive....What?!?! And then sadly lacking a freezer or an office door to protect the world from the flood of my tears, I quickly shut the book and placed it on the floor. It is now staring up me, Read me....Read me. But I must hold out, for I know what lies within.

*All quotes are gross approximations of what might have actually been said.

Indebted.

So, if you know me at all, you know that I am in alot of debt. I went to one minorly expensive, and one majorly expensive university. I moved to NYC without a job, during a national employment crisis. So yeah, I have alot of debt. And I have mostly just resigned myself to it. I have 30 years to pay off my student loans, which will be just in time for me to retire. And everyone in the United States is in debt. It's what we do. It's part of the American Dream.

This is what I told myself for a long time, and it mainly worked. I went to work, paid my bills, occasionally ran out of money before having paid all my bills, but this was the only way I knew how to live. It would occasionally overwhelm me, and I would call one of the friends who knew me well enough to know exactly how deeply mired in debt I was, and they would listen to my panic and my hopelessness at finding a way to stop it, probably growing tired of listening me over and over and over.

My best friend and I trade New Year's resolutions each year, as we have seen each other over the previous 12 months, and know what would be good for the other person. Most of the time. His resolutions for me range from clean out your car and be on time, to this year's be more proactive. Part of this proactivity for me was wrangling my finances. And another friend, in whose apartment I have had a financial melt-down, invited me to go with her to Financial Peace University, which was being led by a friend of ours from our small group at church. I reluctantly agreed, and here we are. I spoke in a previous post about the inner turmoil this class has brought to me, about my struggle to be someone focused on social justice and the needs of others, but to also be fiscally responsible to myself. I can't help but feel that there is an inherent element of selfishness in financial planning. It is a world of my needs first and then yours with whatever I have left. This is not necessarily the way of Dave Ramsey's program, but it leaves Giving to the very last lesson, and speaks very little to the relative wealth of even the most indebted American in comparison to that of almost every other person in the world.

At CCfB this week, we discussed Luke 12:13-21 and Mark 6:25-34, and the ramifications these scriptures should have on our lives. My minister/friend Joe put it up on his blog, and he and I have been e-discussing this a bit today, as he knows I am involved in, and feel extremely conflicted about, Financial Peace University. Dave Ramsey overwhelms me. Every week, I find myself shaking my head at so many of the things he says. But I also know very well, because of what I've watched many of my family and friends go through, that it is necessary to get all of this under control. While I sometimes find Dave greedy, and feel that he is often twisting the meanings of the scriptures he uses in the lessons, I can also see the good in the system he has set up for people. I have always been very open with those closest to me about my financial situation, and talking to many of them about this class, and my struggles with it has helped me to get some perspective on it, and to know that in the end, if I am able to find a way to pay off at least some of my debt, that it will be worth it. And with that I have had to find a way to do this without letting it change my priorities. While Dave Ramsey's goals may not be mine, his means to getting there can be helpful for my situation. And I am doing my best to look for ways to get ahead, but am trying to allow God to show me the way to do this without sacrificing my health, or my sanity, or my principles.

I started reading The Irresistible Revolution around the time I started this class, and while at first it was one of the things that made me want to chuck it all, after much thought it has become kind of a supplemental text to guide me--looking at Dave Ramsey's stuff through a lens of social responsibility in addition to personal/financial responsibility. There is something anti-consumerist about Financial Peace University, because every financial decision is to be made with much thought for the consequences/necessity of it. And if you look at wealth building as what you can give back rather than giving it all to creditors, it changes things a bit. So, all of that to say, I'm still trying to work it out. And to remember this:

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.--Matthew 6:25-29

All at Once.

So it's been a bit since I've posted anything. I've started no less than 5 posts, but could not make any sense of them, so I quit. Right now, as I find myself reading several things at once, my mind is a bit muddled.

Every time I go to Austin, I come back with no less than 5 new books. Part of my circuit there is the book stores, so I hit Book People (a wonder in itself), the Half-Priced Books on North Lamar and the Goodwill near my old apartment that has an impressive, but very unorganized library. This time I can back with Mrs. Dalloway, Franny and Zooey, The Corrections, something called Total Happiness (an independently published book that was quite good until the end) , The Irresisitible Revolution, and Are Men Necessary? by Maureen Dowd (who is an op-ed columnist for the New York Times.) And now I am in the process of getting through all of them.

I started with Are Men Necessary?, which is a commentary on feminism, politics and the rise of cosmetic surgery in America (among other things). And then I moved on to The Irresistible Revolution, which is pretty amazing. And in addition to these two, I'm reading Financial Peace Revisited as part of a class I am taking. Reading The Irresistible Revolution right after Are Men Necessary?, has filled my head with thoughts of revolution, and the means to combat some -isms (i.e. material-, rac-, sex-, etc.), and to bring about others (i.e. optim-, femin-, liberal-, etc.). And then I read about attaining financial peace and am told that I should work toward "wealth building" and that I should have the means to buy a boat should I so choose (I won't, because boats make me nervous, but the choice is there). But the voice in my head responds "Savings, Retirement, Boats, Houses, Cars? But people are sleeping in the park across the street from my office. Something is wrong with this." I feel like I'm simultaneously living in two worlds.

I had been told about The Irresistible Revolution by some friends, but am just now getting to read it. The author, Shane Claiborne, is part of The Simple Way community in Philadelphia. He and several others have opened a community center and live there along side the residents of one of the poorest neighborhoods in the country. In the book he tells stories of protests, and important trips to India and Iraq, and of using joy and love to show the world there is another way. That conflict can be solved without violence, that poverty can be overcome when we care for each other, that dying people can be given dignity even if they cannot be saved. This gives me hope that my generation of Americans is looking at the World differently and seeing what has to be done to make it just, and safe, and peaceful.

So now I am wrestling with and trying to reconcile these two worlds. I find money very tricky, and am made very anxious by its presence in mass, but also by its absence. I have lived my entire life in a place of financial struggle (though I know very well that I and my family are among some of the wealthiest people in the world), and can see the great potential of finally winning this battle. I simply must hope for the discernment to know when enough is enough, and to use what I have to do what is right.

Holiday.

Today is my first day back from a very nice vacation. I was off for a week and spent 4 of those days in Texas. I enjoyed the heat, did a significant amount of car singing, spent alot of time with my wonderful friends, and got to see two of my favorite people get married (to each other). I got to go to Kerbey Lane, and Book People, and both of my favorite grocery stores. And at one point got so lost in the suburbs/woods as to confirm that I can never live there. Trees make me nervous.

S.W.I.S.H.

A few days ago I was walking down 6th Avenue, when I saw my life story sitting the window of Barnes & Noble. It was a book called Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys. I immediately went into the store to read and buy it.

I have long been well-acquainted with the gay community. Call me what you will--straight ally, friend of the family, friend of a friend of Dorothy, or, my favorite, a S.W.I.S.H. And I have read far and wide about the relationship between a gay man and a straight woman (probably looking for validation), but find only tales of shopping and make-overs, scandalous evenings out, drugs and sex and angst, no sports EVER. But this isn't so much how it's been for me. So when I bought this book I was apprehensive.

The first story is about fashionistas. And though I do have a couple of friends with whom I shop and make commentary on the fashion mistakes of others (those who can't, teach), this is not what these friendships are really about. But the next few stories made me smile at recognizing us in them. The one about the friends that met in college and have been by each others' side ever since. The one about the friends who met through friends, and were instantly an item, working together, applying to grad school together, one allowing the other to cry all over his pillow when this doesn't work out. My stories are a mix of these. And though there are specks of raucous behavior in these stories as well, the sentiment of it, knowing that these relationships are just as important in people's lives as the ones sanctioned by law, is still there and makes me laugh and cry and want to write my own story.

100 Best.

I'm a reader. I pride myself of having a wide array of interests, and thus a long, diversified reading list. So I'm setting myself up for a new challenge. I found this list of 100 best (and often banned) books, and as I like controversy, and have decided that I will to read them all. I'm not setting a time line, but maybe within the next two years. (And I must confess, there are other lists, but this on is the one that peaked my interest most. It might be the easiest one, too.) The one's I've read are marked in Green. So here is it...

1. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
3. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
4. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
5. The Color Purple, Alice Walker
6. Ulysses, James Joyce
7. Beloved, Toni Morrison
8. The Lord of the Flies, William Golding
9. 1984, George Orwell
10. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
11. Lolita, Vladmir Nabokov
12. Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
13. Charlotte's Web, EB White
14. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
15. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
16. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
17. Animal Farm, George Orwell
18. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
19. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
20. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
21. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
22. Winnie-the-Pooh, AA Milne
23. Their Eyes were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
24. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
25. Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
26. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
27. Native Son, Richard Wright
28. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey
29. Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
30. For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
31. On the Road, Jack Kerouac
32. The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
33. The Call of the Wild, Jack London
34. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
35. Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
36. Go Tell it on the Mountain, James Baldwin
37. The World According to Garp, John Irving
38. All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren
39. A Room with a View , EM Forster
40. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
41. Schindler's List, Thomas Keneally
42. The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
43. The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
44. Finnegans Wake, James Joyce
45. The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
46. Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
47. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Frank L. Baum
48. Lady Chatterley's Lover, DH Lawrence
49. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
50. The Awakening, Kate Chopin
51. My Antonia, Willa Cather
52. Howard's End, EM Forster
53. In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
54. Franny and Zooey, JD Salinger
55. Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
56. Jazz, Toni Morrison
57. Sophie's Choice, William Styron
58. Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner
59. Passage to India, EM Forster
60. Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton
61. A Good Man is Hard to Find, Flannery O'Connor
62. Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
63. Orlando, Virginia Woolf
64. Sons and Lovers, DH Lawrence
65. Bonfire of the Vanities, Thomas Wolfe
66. Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
67. A Separate Peace, John Knowles
68. Light in August, William Faulkner
69. The Wings of the Dove, Henry James
70. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
71. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
72. A Hithchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
73. Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs
74. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
75. Women in Love, DH Lawrence
76. Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe
77. In Our Time, Ernest Hemingway
78. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein
79. The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett
80. The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer
81. The Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
82. White Noise, Don DeLillo
83. O Pioneers!, Willa Cather
84. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
85. The War of the Worlds, HG Wells
86. Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad
87. The Bostonians, Henry James
88. An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser
89. Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather
90. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
91. This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald
92. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
93. The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles
94. Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis
95. Kim, Rudyard Kipling
96. The Beautiful and the Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald
97. Rabbit, Run, John Updike
98. Where Angels Fear to Tread, EM Forster
99. Main Street, Sinclair Lewis
100. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

34 down, 66 to go. Okay, so now that I've seen the list, I'm promising nothing. That's alot of reading, and many of them are Faulkner who was the bane of my existence in college. Maybe give me 5 years....

A Long Way Gone.

I've been reading a book called A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. It's about a boy who was a child soldier in Sierra Leone. It is terrifying. In an address to the UN, the boy, Ishmael, says "It was not easy being a soldier, but we just had to do it. I have been rehabilitated now, so don't be afraid of me. I am not a soldier anymore; I am a child." I can't imagine such a life, but know that it happens all over the world, even in the United States.

I have a friend here in New York, who has lived here his whole life, and grew up in the neighborhood where I used to live before gentrification made it safe. He told me stories about being attacked and robbed by older kids. About having to drop out of school because he was not safe there. About playing a game with his little brother, where they walked down the street counting all the crack vials.

I read and hear these things and I am shaken. I am fairly certain that I would not have had the will to survive in such a world. I want to know when it will end, and why atrocities such as this continue to occur when the world has the means to stop it.

The Five Fs.

I sometimes get overwhelmed. I can only describe this feeling as being bitch-slapped by Life (that might be my first blog curse word). I get this way every once in a while, just simply overwhelmed by the weight of the world, both my own and that outside me. My health, my job, my friends, my family, war, politics, poverty, loneliness, confusion, separation, illness, frustration. I find it all too impossible to sort through. I hit one of these points this week. I do it to myself. Talking too much, listening too much, reading too much, thinking too much. I called my best friend, who I had seen less than an hour before, and sat with him for the next hour and a half, many moments of that time spent in silence, as he tried to help me come up with an answer. What to do to make it better. We talked about keeping busy, but not by enveloping yourself in the problems, as I am want to do. About finding a way to change the things we actually have control over. About letting go. About rest. About prayer, which I am skeptical of until I am desperate. About humor. About inspiration. About effortless joy. About What Not to Wear.

I had a professor in grad school named Alan Levine. He was basically an expert on support groups and on grief, loss and bereavement. He was by far my favorite professor and one of the only ones who I didn't find pretentious and full of crap. From what I remember, he was the only professor I had who acknowledged the weight and importance of our work, and how this may affect our perspective and our lives. I had him for classes my last two semesters of grad school, and on the last day of the second class I took with him, he gave us some good advice about living and working and maintaining a certain level of sanity. In life you need the 5 Fs--Good Food, Good Friends, Good Family, Good Fun and Good...well, I've already sworn once here today, so I can't say it, but it's there. I think this is true, and I have this...well most of it. Generally, the good food, fun and friends are combined, and this is the greatest blessing in my life. I have an amazing set of friends, with whom I can laugh and cry, eat things with gluten, lament the stupidity of my days, extol the wonder that is Justin Timberlake, confess and be accepted for my secret love of show tunes, be given the family that I've always longed for. And that just about covers it all.

Blogiversary.

Today is my blogiversary. I started this thing last year during NYC's Transit Strike, as none of my patients could get to the hospital for their appointments. Oh, the memories. Thank you for giving me a place to express myself somewhat freely, and to discuss with the blogosphere the wonderings of my heart. Now on to other stuff....

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I have discovered over the past few months of reading and movie and TV watching that I may be every writer's dream. I am moved in all the right places, to the appropriate anger, joy, sadness, etc. I am affected and carry that with me for days. I tell others about it and recommend that they see/read whatever it was. Sometimes I insist and will purchase for them a copy of it. And as I am always reading at least 2 books, its a vast array of knowledge and emotion we're talking about here.

And now the run-down of the stuff I think you should be reading. I am currently reading Barack Obama's first book, Dreams from My Father, and have found myself struck by the person he is and by what amazing things may occur if he is elected president. I've also enjoyed the fact that he freely speaks of having used drugs in his youth, but wonder how this fact will effect him on election day. We don't tend to reward people's honesty with votes. I'm also half-way through with A People's History of the United States (in the 1960s to be exact). I started this one in the summer and have been neglecting it for a while. It's very interesting to look at the history of this country from the perspective of some many different people. But it's also pretty intense and leaves me rather angry with whatever group of oppressors they are talking about that day. And I'm re-reading Blue Like Jazz. I don't normally confess to reading anything existential, or at all religion-based unless it's controversial. I'm very hard core as I was told by my book club last week. But this book is just so amazing. It has the potential to change the way readers think of God and their relationship with God and other human beings. It has an honesty I have not found before. And for this reason I am able to overlook the typos and fact-checking errors. No small feat, I assure you. Not that there are alot, but just that, as I said before, I'm hard core.

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Happy Holidays to everyone! And safe travels. If you're one of the million or so people flying out of LaGuardia tomorrow afternoon, come and find me. I'll be at the American Airlines Terminal, most assuredly waiting hours for my delayed flight.

The Shah of Blah.

Last night I had the amazing privilege of sitting audience for Salman Rusdie. Salman Rushdie is like a rock star in my world. His book Haroun and the Sea of Stories (in which the Shah of Blah is a character) is the first book I read in college and on the list of things that I forcibly make everyone I know read. It was especially wonderful because he wasn't really there promoting a book, but was just speaking his mind as the first lecturer in the "Voices of Reason" series of the Center for Inquiry here in NYC. I cannot express how awesome it was to be able to sit and listen to him.

Mr. Rushdie is a bold man. He spoke at length about the crises in the Middle East and the relationship of Muslim communities to the rest of the world. He spoke of how sometimes respect for a culture can turn into fear of or intimidation by these cultures, citing acts of terrorism by people using the Islamic faith as their justification. And when we address things in the cautious manner that we often do, so that we will not anger a particular group to action against us, it becomes unclear where the problem truly lies. "The point is to call things by their name. To avoid naming them properly, avoids thinking of them properly." I think it's interesting to think about, the fact that so many things have been deemed a product of individual culture and are therefore off limits to discussion.

Mr. Rushdie is decidedly anti-religion, as apparently most of the crowd there last night was. And I feel like it is understandable for him to feel this way. As an adult, he began to criticize Islam, which had been the faith of his family. And as a result, a fatwa was proclaimed by the Ayatollah, and millions of Muslims were instructed to kill him for a hefty reward. And this was not condemned by most of the religious world, even outside of the Muslim sphere. Imagine if GW had put a price on the head of Dan Brown for insinuating in The DaVinci Code that Jesus had married, and that Mary Magdalene was an apostle, and not a prostitute. And then Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell, and the Pope all stood in agreement that this should happen. It's pretty frightening, isn't it?

A friend and I have been talking alot the last few weeks about the tragedy of the way Christianity is viewed by much of the world. And this was very apparent to me last night. Mr. Rushdie talked at length about how he felt when people live their lives by the principles of a religion, any religion, disastrous things tend to happen. Or as he said it "When religion gets into the driving seat, all Hell breaks loose." And from the state of our World, I would say this is true. The principles of Christianity and Islam, and many other religions, have been skewed in such a way that GW is seen by many Americans as the divine liberator of the people of Iraq, when in fact their "liberation" has brought them to the brink of civil war.

As I sit at my work desk, I am still trying to process it all. It has given me alot to think about.

P.S.--I think that I saw Tyne Daly of Cagney & Lacey fame watching off to the side.