Ray’s Faves
Americans Come Up Short: European Holiday
I’m painting with a broad brush here. I know there are many exceptions on both side of the pond… you know who you are.
Europeans understand “Holiday” in a way Americans just cannot fathom.
- First, they have the time-thing down. It’s not uncommon to run into someone from an EU country that has been traveling for over a month and yet they are sad because they only have two weeks before they have to get back to work.
- Second, they call-in their connections: Family, friends, people they just met yesterday…they network week long accommodations like we exchange zucchini bread and Christmas cookies. I’m not entirely certain this is done just as a cost savings, although it is huge for that. A local host can help the traveler avoid the mundane tourist traps and focus on the truly important and most interesting aspects of an area. They also afford entry into suburbs and localities which aren’t typically available to foreigners. Another plus is the building of life long (and often generational) friendships which comes with mutual exchange and hospitality.
- Finally, there is the food thing which Americans also have trouble with. Most Europeans have no problem existing on bread, cheese and sausage. Cucumbers and tomatoes suffice as “salad” and cheap wine (excuse me, I mean “table wine”) and local beer provide variety. Restaurants are a splurge and pubs are as much about meeting and thinking as eating and drinking.
Americans come up short and everybody knows it.
- We make hotel reservations for a week because that’s how long our vacation is – period. We’d never think of paying $300 a night anywhere in the States, but hey, we’re on vacation and the brochure says it’s “in the heart of the city” or “spectacular view.”
- Then we cram as many tourist concessions as possible into each day. It’s just the way we rationalize such short trips.
- We don’t want to do anything that lasts too long. It’s not that we don’t like to languish in the presence of art works from the masters, or admire the grand architectural accomplishments that have withstood the centuries, it’s just we are resistant to the idea that it might interfere with meal time. Some people mistakenly think that food is actually the main reason Americans travel. I’m here to tell you it’s just not so. We’ve already taken all the best food from every culture and made it even better. If you don’t believe me spend week in Seattle.
- Ultimately, Americans are truly fascinated with what travel has to offer. We are drawn to natural beauty, history, people and culture as much as anybody else on the planet; unfortunately we don’t make the time to fully experience that fascination. Our Bad!
Authors Note:
There, now that I have trashed the American way of travel I have this to say… our freedom of expression is important to us (show me a country with more)…whether in politics, religion or culture we can, and often do critically evaluate ourselves. That is why we are still the best country to travel to and live in. Travel on Dude!
Beyond Discussion — How the Abortion Debate Changed Me
My view from the top of the mountain was excellent. My vantage point was truly awesome. A thousand feet of misty air swirled between the tips of my boots and the soggy dark-green valley. Rays of the new sun promised to shed a sanguine light over the earth that lay before me. A patchwork of sleepy fog rested here and there. Not too far away, confused white puffs lingered somewhere between ground and sky. It was perfect. My heart rate had steadied from the rapid twilight journey up the mountainside. Summer’s first pale heat caressed my face. A flitter of wings in a gnarled scrub oak reminded me I was just passing through. There was no holding back, nor was there any reason to. At once a joyful smile and a condensed tear found my face.That moment was one of the many times in my life when I’ve repeated, “I was born for this.” But it was what was just around the corner that would really get me thinking.
I lingered on that rocky outcrop until a small party of others reached my vantage point. Their more celebratory mood did not exactly match mine, so I quietly worked my way to the other side. The small mountain had a sloping top, that was heavily vegetated and there were no direct trails, so I descended to a lower ridge and quickly regained seclusion. Only this time I was facing west. A thick cloud pressed against my side of the mountain. Sun lit the cloud top with an intensity which forced me to put on sun glasses and the cold draft of vexed air made me quickly don my jacket. There I sat — my butt hard against the lichen encrusted rock, my outstretched legs suspended within a rising cloud. “I should go,” I told myself.
Suddenly “bright white” was not just another Sherwin-Williams color choice. Minutes before, I had a brief chance to descend the mountain, but now, I was stuck in an intense luminescence. For an instant I imagined myself inside of a florescent light bulb. Zero visibility. So there I sat with my thoughts. Decidedly, uncomfortable.
Waiting is about my least favorite pastime, but there was little choice. Intellectually, I knew it was unlikely that I’d be stuck for long, so I folded my bare knees, elf-like, into my jacket and scanned the opaque vapor for the first signs of clearing.
Weather may be difficult to predict but change is constant and within minutes of hitting the sunlight the cloud began to diffuse into the bright blue sky. Moments later, the last vestige of wispy veil disappeared and my sight was restored. To my immediate dismay I could see for miles. Before my eyes was an expansive network of logging roads yielding access to hundreds of square miles of clear-cut. Sunlight spilled around my mountain and revealed brown eroded soils spilling into tiny buff colored streams. I could see everything. It was horrendous. It was important.
That morning I saw each view from a high vantage point. Had I stayed on the trail, hung out at the “scenic overlook,” I would have been oblivious to the full reality. Stumbling upon the ugly truth of man’s willingness to rape the wilderness was not my intention when I started my climb. But life’s most important lessons are seldom planned. You’ll see what I mean as I tell you my story.
When I was growing up it seemed as if everybody I knew, had life figured out. That was just what was expected. Our fathers were employed. Our mothers were den leaders and active in the PTA. The older kids were always cool and the younger ones were always pests. School was a necessary drag. Our male teachers were veterans of either WWII or Korea and the female ones were matronly. In PE and shop classes we were always reminded to “Look out for number one.” Drugs were something we talked about more than we did and my early memory of rock and roll was that it was best played loud. My friends and I were the last of the baby boomers and we were totally unaware of what that meant (I’m still not sure).
Early on, “my thing” was social activism. To me righting wrongs was the purest virtue. Unfortunately, the timing never seemed to be right. I would have loved to have been in on the civil rights movement. Only most of the ground work for reform was accomplished before I was born. Even so, Martin Luther King Jr. was a hero of mine. I was not the only one. I can remember my teacher crying as we sat around the class black and white TV set on the day of his funeral.
It is not too much of a surprise that I supported the rights of all people, regardless of race or nationality. Every holiday and many weekends, my house was home to three or four foreign exchange students who attended local universities. With their real families half a world away, my family “adopted” brothers and sisters from all over.
Growing up feeling that the world was full of family, probably had something to do with my hatred of war. Even this was something I could do little about. While my older sister and friends would gather around and discuss American involvement in Viet Nam until late at night, I was sent to bed. However, I was old enough to watch the nightly news with my dad. We both shook our heads (probably for different reasons) as Walter Cronkite announced the weekly death toll. My dad was a big fan of teachable moments even before anybody used the term. Inevitably, World War II would come up. He never talked about Viet Nam, but every other war our nation had been in was fair game. To my dad, war was about one thing and one thing only — freedom.
The first time I ever heard about the Holocaust was through my dad’s hesitant words. After describing the liberation of the men and women from the concentration camps by allied troops, he simply said, “You must know this, so it never happens again.” He never talked about it after that day. A few years later I worked as a lifeguard at our local Jewish Community Center. I can remember telling my dad about some of the men I had seen playing bridge — their sleeves rolled up exposing a sequence of green-blue numbers the Nazis had tattooed on their forearm. He simply shook his head like when we watched Cronkite.
Before I could get a driver license Viet Nam was over (for the U.S. anyway) and national attention was turned to oil supplies, nuclear treaties and Middle East peace talks. Ironically, I saw Israel as the bully and my sympathies leaned to Egypt and the plight of the Palestinians. But there was little I could do.
So I did what millions of my contemporaries did. I jumped on the environmental band wagon. Finally, I was not too late to embrace a great cause nor was I too young. Before I was twenty, I was rubbing elbows with the leaders of the Sierra Club. Invitations to THE prominent gathering were exclusively based on only two criteria. Either you donated a lot of money or you made the club look good through some outstanding piece of work. I did the latter. It was my team of volunteers who took on a wide scale spraying operation and kept the choppers grounded. I was publicly called “a bleeding heart environmentalist” and privately toasted with a glass of bourbon.
After deciding my new friends were a bit high brow and perhaps a little tame. I took a long look at Washington D.C. and decided my activist heart needed the power of a political science degree. But to my surprise, that tract was disrupted by an orchid growing, beer drinking biology professor. He lectured, frankly and eloquently, about the natural world and man’s responsibility to learn as much as possible about life on the planet. By the end of the first lecture, I was hooked. I literally ran to the Academic Dean and before my first week concluded, had managed to overload my schedule with science classes.
After a couple of years my love for biology did have some competition. Carol, a particularly beautiful young woman, stole my heart. We were married, and moved to South Carolina where I attended graduate school. We were comrades. Our cause was the same. We both had disdain for “the establishment” and a desire to help create a better world.
Prior to the elections in 1984, we campaigned hard for the Democratic Party. With a baby on the way, we canvassed strategic neighborhoods and on Election Day, I skipped classes, and drove our Subaru to the housing authority. There, I laid out donuts and cups of coffee on the hood and soon we began to shuttle like minded voters to the polls. It was a blast! We talked a little about the candidates, but usually our conversation turned to the issues; environment, a woman’s right to choose and providing government help for the poor.
That was a sad day. Not one of the candidates we supported won. We kept our chins high and looked ahead four years, confident that voters would wise up. That’s when I met Teddy Kennedy in Seattle. Senator Kennedy acted like we were long lost friends, with an embracing, drawn out handshake. He was clearly drunk. An hour later he cajoled the microphone from our host for an embarrassing rendition of Danny Boy. With a tear rolling down his shiney red face, he was escorted out of the room. I was left thinking, “The summer’s gone and all the flowers are dying….” Those were rough times.
Carol developed a friendship with a woman named Mary. It was apparent that she looked at the world differently than we did. It took me no time to dismiss her as a “constipated Christian,” but my wife was not so sure. “She is one of the most compassionate people I know. Just talk to her,” she challenged.
Clearly, Mary’s pro-life view showed just how ignorant she was. When we finally broached the subject of choice, I gave it to her with both barrels. “Haven’t you read Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb?” “Don’t you know the societal impact of unwanted children?” “What about the Club of Rome and our limited resources?” “We’ve only got one planet!” “Come on Mary, those fundamental views are archaic. With advances in science we can surely do better. After all, religions don’t exactly have a great track record. Do they?”
Then I asked her one last question. I asked her “And what about a woman’s right to choose?” Mary simply answered back with one poignant question: “Does the baby have the freedom to choose life?”
Of course I’d heard that argument. “Blah blah blah?” She didn’t even try to draw the old pro-life similarity between “pre-born’s” and slaves. As a debater, Mary was a lightweight, and for a while I was able to march on in lockstep with my pro-choice friends.
About this time we were moving. As I was going through my collection of books I found some old books that had strongly shaped my opinions in the seventies. Flipping through them again, I was shocked by what I was seeing. Not only had these books taken on the yellow edge and musty scent associated with aged paperbacks, but the content was equally distressed. Even after throwing out a UFO book and The Late Great Planet Earth, I was still left with a rather dated collection of scientific exploitation. A couple are worthy of noting here.
- The “science” in The Population Bomb seemed so authoritative in the seventies. But by 1990, Paul Ehrlich looked more and more the fool. Besides being categorically off base about the effects of population growth, in 1970 he predicted, “In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.”
- The Club of Rome and their 1972 report Limits to Growth did not fair any better in the test of time. Their advanced computer models predicted the world’s oil would be consumed by 1990. Looking back, their effort seemed no more reliable than religious cults prophesying the end of the world.
“In light of new evidence – revise!” That was drilled into me as a science major. Had I forgotten? Was I guilty of intellectual laziness? Maybe. But faced with the prospects of a colossal error of rational thought, I did what most people would have done in my shoes — set out to prove I was right. Fortunately, poring over up-to-date environmental, health and population research, much of what I found supported what I was after. Sure it was mostly regurgitated campus philosophy wrapped in bad science, but it comforted me and confirmed my existing ideals.
Many of the experts were even names who I had respected so greatly and quoted so frequently. For the most part, they had not revised their theories in light of new evidence, but they had found new data to support their old hypothesis. Mostly, they ignored previous errors and deftly modified their data, extended their predictions, and cranked up the sirens of crisis. They never looked back.
The mirror I was looking into revealed copious amounts of junk science, but in this life we tend to judge ourselves by our intentions. My intentions were to maintain my views which matched the views of the intellectuals I admired. Since there was plenty of fashionable agreement among friends and colleagues, I ignored the contradictions. None of the warning signs caught my attention. It was easy to update my repertoire of quotes and statistics, and charge ahead — old perspectives, fully intact.
That worked just fine until my children and their homeschooled friends needed a science teacher. One day a week I taught the basics. We began with the scientific method. Teaching young people is a great responsibility and it was my turn to guide them — show them what science is, and what science is not.
On a personal level, trouble was brewing and there was no place for me to hide. My pop science, go-with-the-flow attitude could no longer holdout. As I studied the words of Rene Descartes, “…carefully avoid haste and prejudice in judgments…” and regarded the meticulous scrutiny of Francis Bacon, I realized I had been living a lie.
If you have ever been hit in the face with a baseball you understand what I’m about say. “I never saw it coming!” Never in my wildest dreams had I planned on trading in my pseudoscience easy-chair for a cold lichen encrusted rock. Just like that morning in the Blue Ridge Mountains, I moved to the other side and gained a whole new perspective. I opened my heart and my eyes and took a long honest look at all the facts as the fog lifted.
My desire to support my early scientific heroes, to confirm my politics and justify social engineering just didn’t work out like I had planned. But to make matters worse, I just couldn’t get past the basic human rights issue that Mary had challenged me with. “Does the baby have the freedom to choose life?”
This time the tears flowed out of compassion. When the cloud lifted, I was open to the truth of the reality which lay before me. It wasn’t the pretty valley with scattered patches of fog. This time, I saw the barren, eroding landscape that is man’s willingness to destroy innocent human life.
Curiously, none of my friends, people who openly spoke of social justice, and acted out against war, not one of my comrades who protested against capital punishment, not one of my buddies who spoke out for animal rights or homosexual rights was willing to join me on my side of the mountain and look at the realities of abortion. I quickly learned that abortion is a topic that is beyond discussion. Surprisingly, these same people who pride themselves as academics, are not willing to investigate or even explore this realm. Their minds are made up. “Abortion is a choice that only the woman can make.” Therefore, there can be no meaningful debate, and because every situation is different, there is nothing more to learn. Period…end of dialog.
In reality, there is a great deal to learn, but unfortunately the knowledge cannot be gained from a comfortable perch overlooking sweeping generalities and statistical demographics. In order to view the facts, a willingness to move to a different, albeit less comfortable, viewpoint is necessary.
During my youth I learned that righting wrongs is perhaps the purest virtue. While it is not the only thing that is important in life, it certainly adds significance to our existence. Learning about the personal and social effects of abortion is vital to the health and future of our world. Abortion not only brutally snuffs out an innocent human life, but its effects are devastating to the mother, family, and society.
Further Reading: Introduction to a Less Comfortable Viewpoint
Statement of Brenda Pratt Shafer, R.N.
Health, Vitality and Wellness Guaranteed – Think again!
Who was it that told you good health would always be your free gift? Who said it would be easy to maintain your health and vitality throughout your whole life? Who told you that you could sit back and be free from disease and illness forever?
Who are we kidding? The answer is NOBODY. Our life is a precious gift from God. Nobody said it came with a guarantee for good health. Nobody told us we would never wake up and feel crummy. Nobody told us we will never find ourselves confronted with a serious illness. Nobody said we will always be able to do the things we used to do. NOBODY said health would be easy! So, why are we surprised that good health is something that each of us must work toward?
Sure we all want great health to come easy, but the quicker we accept that we must work for it and earn it, the quicker we will start making a difference. We only get one body and now is the time to start taking care of it. What we do to and with our bodies makes a significant difference to our future health and well-being.
There are very clear examples that illustrate how the choices we make have a profound effect on our health. There is the dental example. Imagine making all the wrong choices. First always eat and drink a lot of sugar, let it bathe your teeth twenty-four hours a day and never visit a dentist. That’s stupid you’d say. Everyone would agree. It’s much smarter to take positive, preventive steps like reducing sugar, brushing after each meal and get regular dental checkups.
Another problem that effects millions of Americans is cardiovascular disease. Look at the recipe for this tragic condition. First, be sure not to lift a finger, and then eat enormous quantities of foods high in hydrogenated transfats and salt, smoke at least a pack of cigarettes a day and make sure your job and family life is full of stress. Just like dental decay, prevention can ward off heart disease. Simply by exercising often, eating unprocessed foods with natural fats and oils, and sticking to a variety of raw fruits and vegetables, coupled with a low stress environment we can add years onto an active life.
I could site a dozen more examples just as obvious as these. Our lifestyle, what we eat, what we do, our attitude and what professional care we seek all effects our health. Have no doubt, if we choose to ignore our health, it will go away.
Our health goals should always be designed to add years to life and life to years. And now is a great time to take a deep look into the five pillars of health. Take a look at the food you eat, is your nutrition good? How about exercise, is it adequate? Is your body functioning optimally? Consider nerve function a high priority. And what about rest? Is your body getting what it requires to thrive? And how is your mental attitude and spiritual nature? Is it up to the task of keeping desire and hope alive and well?
Just about everybody can do better in these areas. It’s never too late to develop a plan to strengthen your weak points, while making prevention a focus of your attention. If you need a little incentive to get you started just act like your life depends on it. It does!
Enjoy!
