Wednesday, October 28, 2009

What friends?

I've been a bit down lately, friends are few (non-existent?) and far between.  And then I remembered this.  It helps, a little.

Joseph Scriven wrote this for his mother in 1865; she was alone in Ireland at the time while he was in Canada.

What a Friend We Have in Jesus

What a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear!
What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer!
O what peace we often forfeit, O what needless pain we bear,
All because we do not carry everything to God in prayer.

Have we trials and temptations? Is there trouble anywhere?
We should never be discouraged; take it to the Lord in prayer.
Can we find a friend so faithful who will all our sorrows share?
Jesus knows our every weakness; take it to the Lord in prayer.

Are we weak and heavy laden, cumbered with a load of care?
Precious Savior, still our refuge; take it to the Lord in prayer.
Do thy friends despise, forsake thee? Take it to the Lord in prayer!
In his arms he'll take and shield thee; thou wilt find a solace there.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Speaker for the Dead

I want a speaker for the dead; at the rate I'm going will probably need one soon.

This is what I think to be a good example of the thought provoking work that Orson Scott Card has done in his book "Speaker for the Dead".  This is the intro to Chapter 16.

A great rabbi stands teaching in the marketplace.  It happens that a husband finds proof that morning of his wife's adultery, and a mob carries her to the marketplace to stone her to death.  (There is a familiar version of this story, but a friend of mine, a speaker for the dead, has told me of two other rabbis that faced the same situation.  Those are the ones I'm going to tell you.)

The rabbi walks forward and stands beside the woman.  Out of respect for him the mob forbears, and waits with the stones heavy in their hands.  "Is there anyone here," he says to them, "who has not desired another man's wife, another woman's husband?"

They murmur and say, "We all know the desire.  But, Rabbi, none of us has acted on it."

The rabbi says, "Then kneel down and give thanks that God made you strong."  He takes the woman by the hand and leads her out of the market.  Just before he lets her go, he whispers to her, "Tell the lord magistrate who saved his mistress.  Then he'll know I am his loyal servant."

So the woman lives, because the community is too corrupt to protect itself from disorder.

Another rabbi, another city.  He goes to her and stops the mob, as in the other story, and says, "Which of you is without sin?  Let him cast the first stone."

The people are abashed, and they forget their unity of purpose in the memory of their own individual sins.  Someday, they think, I may be like this woman, and I'll hope for forgiveness and another chance.  I should treat her the way I wish to be treated.

As they open their hands and let the stones fall to the ground, the rabbi picks up one of the fallen stones, lifts it high over the woman's head, and throws it straight down with all his might.  It crushes her skull and dashes her brains onto the cobblestones.

"Nor am I without sin," he says to the people.  "But if we allow only perfect people to enforce the law, the law will soon be dead, and our city with it."

So the woman died because her community was too rigid to endure her deviance.

The famous version of this story is noteworthy because it is so startlingly rare in our experience.  Most communities lurch between decay and rigor mortis, and when they veer too far, they die.  Only one rabbi dared to expect of us such a perfect balance that we could preserve the law and still forgive the deviation.  So, of course, we killed him.

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Quaint

Drove thru a quaint little town a few days ago.  Must now be less than 1000 residents, but in a farming region, so I would guess that most of the people that call it home don't actually live in town.  Still.

One of the larger stores is the local sporting goods outlet.  You can rent your tux for your prom or wedding there, buy your new deer rifle or the ammo for it there, buy work boots, or sit around bs'ing with the good ole boys.  The stores name?  He-Mart.

Next door to the He-Mart is the local movie theater.  Now showing: Inglorious Bast$$$s.  Really, that is exactly what the sign said.

And I almost forgot: "Wally's Market - consistently low prices every day"  Maybe they were consistent; consistently about double the price at WalMart last time I checked.  But the nearest WalMart that I was aware of was over 100 miles away.

Half the Post office is now a local bank.  The Main entrance leads into the bank.  You wanted to mail a letter?  Oh, you want the side entrance.

Met some really nice and helpful folks there.  Really, a nice town.  If I thought I could find steady work there I would have tried to stay, but I really don't want to be in Ag related work, no I really don't.  But it is good to see that towns like this still exist.  Places are known by the name of the original owner.  "Oh, that's Bjornson's place.  I don't recall who lives there now, is it Jackson?  Don't remember.  They have 600 acres in potatoes."

Half the buildings on Main Street are empty.  I didn't notice that any were boarded up, but looking thru the windows you can see that the roofs are leaking, ceilings collapsing.   It is sad that small town America has to die like this, but I don't know what anyone can do about it.  They are very traditional.  When I asked why they did something a certain way, I was told that is the way it has always been done.  When I pointed out that there might be a different way I was told that the old way works ok so there is no need to look for a better way.  And that was from a farmer with a college degree.  So be it.  And I liked his bumper sticker, he was laughing at me as he showed it to me: "My Tractor costs more than your sports car".  I didn't ask him how much he owed on his tractor.  The 5 that I saw were all gigantic, steering by bending in the middle, quad tires on each corner, GPS controlled to within an inch.  You tell it what field you are working in and it will run the planter down the exact same rows as it it will run the harvester down in 6 months.  No steering, the 'driver' sits there and watches the tractor drive itself.  Damn.  But imagine what happens if the satellite signal goes down.  It does happen in bad weather, then the operator drives it back to the edge of the field, gets in his truck and goes home.  Farming still depends on the weather.

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Learning time

Well, I'm beginning to learn a few things about myself, including the fact that I can actually live without contact with so-called 'civilization' for days on end.  And enjoy it!

But I did have the opportunity to take a break from my retreat, so I'm spending a day in a large city in the midwest in a hotel room catching up with the world and researching answers to some of the questions I have asked myself the last week.

There are times when it is tempting to be a neo-luddite, and technology can be perverted by the dark side, but technology in and of itself is neither good nor evil, technology is amoral.  The people who use the technology have to supply the morals, have to take responsibility for their own actions and use of the technology.

20-some years ago when we looked for a place to live and landed in Itasca County, we made phone calls and sent letters to chambers of commerces and got phone directories and other info from the places we were interested in.  And this process all took time.  Now, with just the click of the mouse button and a few characters typed on the keypad I can google a city, check its vital stats including employment and crime trends and cross the location off my list or add it to a list for further research.

When I switched careers last from mechanic to computer tech, the Internet had just been born and was mostly a sea of BBS's.  Alta Vista was trying to index the web.  But a lot of data was not available online, or even if it was no-one knew where to find it.  Trying to track down employment trends and skills trends took days of work and help from the people at the Job Search office who had access to their special databases that the public couldn't access.

Now anyone with a few moments of internet access can readily see that the Dept of Labor is predicting that the job outlook for Medical Transcriptionists is going to grow at a rapidly accelerating pace because the aging of America will require more people to visit Dr offices requiring more dictation to be transcribed.  Personally, I think that the DOL has water on the brain, but the fact is, ANYONE can look it up in a matter of moments.

So, time to get busy looking for the answers to those questions.  Things like
Where shall I live, and how shall I pay the bills when I get there?  And who am I?  And how can I prove that I am a US citizen?  Just simple things like that.

Thursday, October 1, 2009

Don't Panic

For some reason, some people seem to panic when they don't hear from me for a couple of days, so I'm tellin' ya now, don't. I will be out of touch with civilization for the next 2 - 3 weeks. I'm leaving early Friday morning, don't know if I will have any access at all to internet or email or cell service, pretty remote area where I'm going.

So, we'll have to catch up in a few weeks, do not panic.