Cannot Be Right

I've seen the numbers in this Atlantic piece before. Although the article itself is more elaborate, the gist of it can be summed up pretty easily and illustrated simply as in the chart below which shows what Americans think the distribution of wealth in the country is and what is is really. Each quintile represents a fifth, or 20 percent of the population.

Bottom line: the inequality of wealth in America is stark. The top 20 percent hole 84 percent of the wealth, the bottom 40 percent, a barely perceptible percentage. For all intents and purposes, the bottom 40 percent have nothing. And the next 40 percent have 16 percent of the wealth. You have to let these numbers sink if and swirl around for a bit to understand what we're talking about here, and what this means. It means we have a huge number of very poor people in this country compared to a middling number who've got almost everything. This cannot be right.

It's Much Worse than We Think . . .

And it isn't. People know this and the way it comes out that they know it is what they tell you when you ask them to say what they think the ideal distribution of wealth in a society in which they would consent to live should be. What they say appears in the dark black bars below. And here's the amazing thing about these numbers to me. There was virtually no difference between Democrats and Republicans on this question . . . or among other demographic divides either: gender and income. Amazing, really. This is something that Americans across the board agree upon. Like motherhood and apple pie.

. . . But We Would Like It to Be Much Better

Rocking in the Book World

English: Neil Young in concert in Oslo, Norway in 2009. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I read in the USA Today that my man Neil Young is going to be coming out with a memoir entitled Waging Heavy Peace. I've never been a big consumer of rock 'n roll literature – at least not the book variety – but I think this is one book I'm probably going to have to get. This tome, after all, is about my man, a guy have been following since the beginning of his career back in the 1960s when he was with Buffalo Springfield, even before he went out solo.

As you can see, Neil is looking a little ragged these days; of course it's nothing but getting old. That process isn't very kind to any of us, but it doesn't – at least shouldn't –affect our integrity, something that Neil Young has kept throughout his entire career. The man is simply not cared about what the critics thought about what anybody thought really when it came to his musical choices in the various experimental paths he's gone down over the years. I'll be interested in what he has to say.

I'll be similarly interested in what Pete Townsend of The Who has to say in his new book. It's called Who I Am and is supposed to be released a few days after Neil's book on October 8. 

It's kind of interesting what the younger people's take on this is:

"There's a growing sense of the mortality of these people, not to mention the mortality of the readers," says Anthony DeCurtis, Rolling Stone contributing editor. "As they get into their 60s, they think, 'If I don't do it now, I'm not going to do it.' Readers feel a sense of urgency, too. This might be the last time they hear from this person directly." 

Geez, I hope that's not the case.

Related articles

• Randy Bachman On Neil Young: 'He's Writing His Memoirs From My Brain!' (myq105.cbslocal.com)
• Neil Young Explains Buffalo Springfield's Aborted Reunion (snspost.com)

Where We're All Going

Tonight Susan and I went to a wake service for an old and dear friend named Carl Amend. He died in his sleep of a massive stroke a few days ago. Carl and I go back a long way here in Oklahoma. We first met him and his wife Sharan during our Marriage Encounter phase, an experience that led both Carl and I into the diaconate for the Church. We were in the same formation class. We spent a lot of time together. We were in the same tutor group, spent 10 days during the summers for three years at intensive training. It was not long after ordination, about 6 months to a year, as I recall, that Carl had to move because of his job, off to St Louis, New Jersey, and then the somewhere in Texas. I think it might've been Austin. He moved back to Oklahoma City just a few years ago, and one of the last "official" duties as I did as a deacon was to bless his house, his new house.

Carl and I were always simpatico. We thought a lot alike in the spiritual realm, and he was a guy you could always count on. I could always count on Carl to be there if I needed him. He had a big rollicking laugh, and he loved to drink beer, two traits that are going to endear me to just about anybody. But he was generous, funny, unassuming, loyal, and dedicated to his family. It's ironic, I think, that here I am retired from the permanent diaconate and active ministry after 25 years, while Carl after he left Oklahoma City right after ordination never again practiced active ministry. I'm not sure why. We talked about it, but it was never really clear to me. Sharan told me this morning that she wants to talk to me about the diaconate, about Carl's choices. I'm looking forward to the conversation. (By the way, I don't miss the deacon ministry very much, but during these "family" times – funerals, baptisms, marriages – I feel the loss of my ministry most acutely.)

But in the meantime I mourn another of my friends who's gone. In addition to only other woeful results of getting older among the worst is this one: friends die. To me, it's one of the worst aspects of what is admittedly pretty bad deal. I loved Carl. I will miss him.

It's Time

It's quite a liberation to reach the point in your mind and your life where the sacred and the profane are no longer two separate worlds. I'm not completely there yet, but it's the direction I've been pulled in for several years now. I've been thinking about going over to Santa Fe for one of Richard Rohr's conferences for quite awhile. I think at this point in my spiritual development, it's time.

Can't Let It Go

Still can't get the Colorado killings out of my mind. This blog post by a similarly outraged citizen, one Paul Constant from the great state of Maine, caught my eye. This guy is just as mad but considerably more profane than I. I really couldn't agree more:

I hate this. I hate all of this. I hate what happened. I hate that the perpetrator's face is plastered all over every website I go to like some sort of celebrity. I hate that news outlets don't have anything to report but they're still reporting on it anyway. I hate that movie theaters will be prone to these sorts of Age-of-Terror overreactions for months to come. And I hate that this will happen all over again at some point in the future, when another person who's slipped through the cracks legally buys a bunch of guns and decides to force his will on the world. I hate that the safety net is in tatters. And I hate that President Obama's statement after the shooting dared to use the word "shocked." 

Of course he was "saddened." We were all saddened. But can you even say you're "shocked" anymore in America when a young man murders and injures dozens of people in a matter of minutes? We've all lived through this before, dozens of times. The scale is always different, but the crime is the exact same. There's nothing shocking about it anymore. I bet you the cable news networks have protocols and procedures written out in memos for this sort of thing happening. Because it happens all the fucking time. That's the opposite of shocking. It's a recurring problem. And rather than try to come up with solutions to this recurring problem, we mutter and mumble about being shocked and saddened, and we accuse each other of politicizing a tragic event.

As usual, The Onion gets things exactly right. I strongly endorse the article listed below.

Related articles

• Sadly, Nation Knows Exactly How Colorado Shooting's Aftermath Will Play Out (theonion.com)

http://www.bradycampaign.org/studies/view/141/

Sign of the Times

Maybe it's a sign for all times, but I read today that a British hotel in the Lake District is replacing the ubiquitous Gideon bible with the so-called "mommy porn" novel Fifty Shades of Grey. My wife, who never reads books, or I should say hardly ever, tore through all three of the novels in the saga. She even took one of them on vacation with us to Canada! The series prompted some bizarre questions from her to me.

But I'm getting sidetracked. Don't know about you, but this strikes me as perverse at the least. One of my regular correspondents applauded the move saying that there were many religions, so why should hotels have the book of only one. Fair enough. But replace bibles with a pornographic novel? Really?

Baring the TSA

Score one for emphatic free speech. A judge in Oregon has upheld the right of an (obviously) outraged patron of airline services at the Portland International Airport to remove all of his clothes before going through the TSA checkpoint. This has been done before, but I don't remember a court ruling on the matter till now. "Judge David Rees said nudity laws don’t apply when it comes to protest. 'It is the speech itself that the state is seeking to punish, and that it cannot do.'"

The TSA, damn them, cannot be happy about this. Just think if they had to deal with naked people all the time . . . I do dearly wish that some mass way of protesting the indignity of TSA procedures getting on airplanes could be devised. But, then again, the vast majority of the people in this country are such sheep, it would never work even on the unlikely chance it did happen. In this particular incident, the TSA clowns harassed a passenger, John Brennan, at a scanner beyond the bounds of his patience. He had refused the scanner and the pat-down resulted in some nitrate residue on his clothes. So he stripped off all his clothes to go through the checkpoint. At which point he was arrested, naturally. What else would you expect? (Source)

Related articles

• Decent Exposure: Guy Who Stripped Naked to Protest TSA Is Found Not Guilty (loweringthebar.net)

What We Hate about the Net

This is pretty accurate for me. I've gotten a lot better about wasting my time on the Internet. Don't spend nearly the time that I used to, although you probably couldn't get my spouse to agree with you.You can really piss away a lot worthy time in front of computer screens, as I'm sure you know. Remember when the Internet was first around. In those first few years, we were reading a lot of stuff about "Internet addiction." And self-help pieces about how to avoid getting hooked. Well, I don't think we succeeded very well, do you? Look out in a crowd sometimes and see how many people are messing with their smart phones. All that is Internet, except for the very few who are actually involved in phone calls.

I find it encouraging that the number one complaint is "untrustworthy information." But I wonder where all of these citizens for accurate information are? I haven't met many of them. The last four reasons at the end of the graphic are interesting. The last two are obviously porn-related. But I wonder about "damage to credibility." Are we talking about people publicly citing the Net with some of that untrustworthy information? And I have to confess I'm a bit baffled by the "unfamiliar forums." Anybody have any idea what that means? Obviously, there are going to be forums that aren't familiar . . . . but why should that be a complaint for almost half the people?

Related articles

• Does the Internet Really Make Everyone Crazy? (healthland.time.com)
• We're All Internet Addicts, And We're All Screwed, Says Newsweek (forbes.com)
• Are You Addicted To The Internet? [You Told Us] (makeuseof.com)

Gun Nut Logic

Here, brothers and sisters, is the impeccable logic of the gun-crazed nimwits, who parrot whatever absurd flights of intellectual fantasy the NRA is using this month to justify flooding the country with as many firearms as possible, including automatic weapons. The insanity that rules over the past few years is that the more people who walked around armed, the safer we are all going to be. Put out a fire by pouring gasoline on it. Same thing. I really don't know when the people of this country lost their collective mind . . . maybe it was ever so.

Here's the word. This is "Purdue student and Young America's Foundation [so-called] Intern Scholar Hillary Cherry":

I cannot help but think, if one person in that audience was carrying a gun with them, that person could have saved lives. Unfortunately - despite what some of the Left have said - this tragedy is an example of the importance of our Second Amendment Rights.

Mass shootings can be stopped. People need to arm themselves with the facts (and with weapons). If one law-abiding person in the theater had been carrying a gun, lives could have been saved. (Source)

For a map showing the 50 mass murders in the U.S. over the past 30 years, see the map accompanying this article. It will stun you.

We're Number One!

 
The shooting in Aurora, Colorado, has prompted an outpouring of commentary in the webosphere. The graphic above comes from an interesting blog I check out occasionally called "Crooked Timber."* This chart depicts the number of deaths per 100,000 population attributable to violence. It doesn't take a college degree to understand just how far out of whack this country is compared to the rest of the world when it comes to visiting mayhem and hurt on fellow citizens. We're number one, baby! It's not even close.

Best of All: Louisiana, My Ancestral Home

Even more disconcerting is this chart. Louisiana, by far, is the worst in the country for violence. By far, far. This will not surprise many of my relatives and Susan's who still live there. Their complaints about how awful the violence and killings are in their own backyard are constant.

Just some cheery info for you to think about in the wake of the mass murder in Aurora. Already I've read about three articles saying that nothing whatever is going to be done to curb the insane arms sales and possession in this country.

*The full title of the blog is interesting: "Out of the Crooked Timber of Humanity, No Straight Thing was Ever Made."