In the last two years, an adjoining headstone announced the passing of both of her parents. Since she was an only child, the passing of her parents seems like a second tragedy. Though I had never spoken to them, I did write them once, and received a nice letter in return. It gave me some comfort knowing that they were out there, that other people remembered my friend, presumably even better than I did.

Now, I don’t know. Am I the last person to remember her? Will I be the last to visit her grave?

People vanish so unexpectedly from this world. I don’t know that I think of death as a tragedy. But that doesn’t stop me from missing people who so abruptly vanish. And it doesn’t stop me from hoping they are happy now. And I am just selfish enough to wish they were still here with me.

The night before, we made signs for use in the march. Much fun was had by all.

Sunday morning, we began to march to the convention center.

There was a lot of energy and excitement as we marched.

We got to talk to a few legislators on their way into to register for the conference.

But I would be lying if I said it wasn’t hot. It was. Very. Everyone was committed, but we needed breaks from marching.

We were told not to sit on the wall, though, so we took our breaks in the park across the street. The heat index was supposed to be around 110, and it felt like it. By the end of the day, we were all pretty tired. But we were happy for what we had accomplished. Literature handed out, news interviews, people talked to, and awareness raised.

The party afterwards suffered from a lousy restaurant. Extremely poor service and a failure to provide adequate space marred an otherwise wonderful day. But once we quit the restaurant, several of us hit a nearby pub and enjoyed ourselves immensely.

The only downside to the whole event, for me, was how quickly the time passed. I didn’t feel like I had enough time to visit with friends. Being surrounded by these people was both empowering and comforting. It was almost like a two-day long support group with a healthy dose of activism thrown in.

I originally did not plan to go next year, as San Antonio in late July is not my cup of tea. But now I don’t think I can wait any longer to see this group of people. I wish I was still there. So now I’m going to try to find a way to make it again next year.

And I look forward to the day when we don’t need the demonstration anymore, and we can just plan a weekend party. But until then, I cannot imagine a better way to spend two days than protesting with my fellow adoptees.

Plenty of time, that is, if nothing went wrong.

Twenty minutes down the road, and the engine maintenance light came on. We pulled off at a nearby gas station, and I checked everything I could, which basically consisted of the oil level and making sure the gas cap was on correctly. But neither seemed to be the problem.

There is something so typical about this, that I wasn’t even surprised. Indeed, I think I would have been more surprised if nothing had gone wrong. It seems that lately all of our trips have some kind of snafu.

This was my grandmother’s car, so we called my father, hoping he would tell us that it was normal for the car and we could ignore it. But it wasn’t to be. Instead, he offered to switch cars with us. He drove down to meet us, letting us take his car, as he drove the other to get it checked out. (Turns out, it was the air filter.)

So we were back on the road, and on target to get to Louisville by five. The rest of the trip went smoothly and we found the hotel without a problem.

We met other adoptees almost immediately. First it was Theresa, then Jeff. There is something so cool about meeting other like-minded people, especially ones you have such great admiration and respect for.

We were starving and thought we had enough time to eat before the sign-making party. We found an interesting looking Irish pub, and it would have been perfect if the service had been timely. As it was, we got to the party about half an hour late.

I think I colored in one sign over the course of the next two hours. It was too hard to do that and meet people face-to-face who I had known forever online. Jeni, Kara, Julie, Dory, Joy, Elizabeth, Linda, Jim, Diane, Cheerio, Amanda, Spencer… I’m sure I’m forgetting people, but it was so much fun.

At the end, there was a brief workshop for how to talk to legislators. Gaye and Jeff did a terrific job. As a student of strategic nonviolence, it was fascinating to hear others employ the principles in a real training session.

After that, there was much drink to be had. Maybe too much. Though, for me, I’m usually so shy around other people, it may have helped loosen me up a bit, so I actually managed to talk to people. (I hope not too much. And I hope I didn’t say anything too stupid.) We had a blast. We had been told the hotel bar closed at ten, but I think the bartender realized how much money there was to be made and stayed open until midnight.

I wish even more of my online friends had been able to make it. There is just something so amazing about meeting some of your favorite people on the planet.

And in just over an hour, we’ll be gathering to go do what we came here to do.

Some of the responses are something of a red herring. They at least miss the point. These are the responses from members of the movement who claim not to be racist themselves. Of course, if the charge is, as I understand it, that some members of the movement are racist and should be purged, saying that you aren’t racist isn’t really the point. If the NAACP had claimed that all members were racist, then your response would be relevant.

What is really obnoxious, though, is the form of ad hominem that some of the responses have taken. Rather than defending those charged with racism, these response simply claim that the NAACP is itself racist. This is the tu quoque fallacy, or more colloquially, “I know you are, but what am I?”

In essence, they claim that they can be racist, and ignore charges of racism from the NAACP because that organization is also racist.

Counter-charges are as old as politics itself, I suspect, but they are a crappy way to reason.

If you think the NAACP is racist (and I’m not saying they are, but I’m not going to have that argument here), then they are being hypocritical. But that doesn’t mean you get to be a racist, too. Racism is wrong. If the NAACP engages in it, it is wrong to do so. And if the Tea Party is doing so, it’s wrong, too. It’s no defense to point out your accuser’s hypocrisy.

I don’t think the Tea Party is inherently racist, not from what I’ve seen anyway. But if there are racist elements in it, then it should seek to eliminate those elements from its ranks. Instead, its supporters seem mostly interested in giving fallacious defenses of people most of them don’t even know.

Inception belongs right up there with them. Nolan has crafted a tricky movie based on a tricky premise: people can go into your dreams to find your secrets. Despite the twists and turns, the dreams within dreams, the film manages to tell a coherent and comprehensible tale of espionage and deception.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Cobb, a corporate spy, stealing business secrets for whoever will pay for them. Cobb is hired to do the impossible: plant a thought inside someone’s head rather than steal one. He has to put a team together, and the action begins.

It’s hard to say much more without spoiling most of the fun here. The visuals are appealing. The effects are nifty, but unlike so many other films, the emphasis is on the story and the characters, not the CGI.

DiCaprio is superb here, as are his supporting cast members. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays his second. Ellen Page is the greenest member of the team, the new architect of the dreamscapes in which their plans unfold. Cillian Murphy is Robert Fischer, Jr., their target. All of them do a fine job, but the emphasis of the film is on Cobb, and DiCaprio has the chops to bring the depth to the character that he requires.

This is smart summer fare. Not too heavy, but definitely raises some fascinating questions. It made me wish I still taught Introduction to Philosophy on a regular basis; this film would be perfect for the class.

FOR THE RECORDS II: AN EXAMINATION OF THE HISTORY AND IMPACT OF ADULT ADOPTEE ACCESS TO ORIGINAL BIRTH CERTIFICATES

Authors: Dr. Jeanne A. Howard, Susan Livingston Smith, and Georgia Deoudes.

Published: 2010 July. New York NY: Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute

For the Records II: An Examination of the History and Impact of Adult Adoptee Access to Original Birth Certificates” is based on a years-long examination of relevant judicial and legislative documents; of decades of research and other scholarly writing; and of the concrete experiences of states and countries that have either changed their laws to provide these documents or never sealed them at all.

The Institute’s report suggests that, while a growing number of states have restored OBC access to adopted people once they reach the age of majority, efforts to accelerate the trend have been impeded by misunderstandings about the history of this controversial issue, misconceptions about the parties involved (especially birthmothers), and mistaken concerns about the impact of changing the status quo – e.g., legislators often assume that negative consequences will occur but, in fact, they do not.

Among the findings in the 46-page Policy Brief, which updates and expands the Institute’s November 2007 report, “For the Records: Restoring a Right for Adult Adoptees,” are:

• Barring adopted adults from access to their OBCs wrongly denies them a right enjoyed by all others in our country, and is not in their best interests for personal and medical reasons.
• Alternatives such as mutual consent registries are ineffective and do not meet adoptees’ needs.
• The vast majority of birthmothers don’t want to be anonymous to the children they relinquished.

The recommendations in the Institute’s new Policy Brief include:

• Every “closed” state should unseal OBCs for all adult adoptees, retroactively and prospectively.
• States that already provide limited OBC access should revise laws to include all adult adoptees.
• No professional should promise women anonymity from the children they place for adoption.

I don’t think the same way other people do. Maybe there are others who think the way I do; I can’t be sure. But other people think differently. Not better or worse. But different.

The reason this wasn’t obvious for me is that I had misidentified the problem. For so long, I thought my problem relating to others was communication. I thought I didn’t know how to communicate in a way that would get through.

This explains disagreements I’ve had in my personal life and online. I argue with people and get confused when they seem to misunderstand me. I thought I must be doing something wrong in the way I said things.

It turns out, instead, I think differently. I’m nearly sure of it, now. Doing a better job of listening to others, and noting where things go wrong, I’m picking up on it a little more clearly.

I don’t think I could explain how I think differently. And certainly I know that at least some others think like I do (or perhaps the other way around) at least some of the time. Ronni and I, for instance, sometime make the same connections. Probably we’ve had a great deal of influence on one another.

How this might be useful to me is not clear. What it means for my attempts to communicate is trying to pick up on those times that my thought process has diverged wildly from someone else and not try to plow ahead. I don’t know. But it seems important. And I’m trying to do a better job of stopping and noting the important things that occur to me.

The best way for me to proof-read stuff I’ve written is to read it aloud. That process serves two purposes.

The first is practical. Proof-reading my own stuff is very nearly impossible. I believe this is probably true for most people. When I proof-read silently, my mind is happy to supply missing words or correct typos. In other words, I miss mistakes. Reading the material out loud forces me to notice those mistakes more fully than I otherwise would. This is the reason I recommend proof-reading aloud to all my students. It’s not fool-proof, but it’s more thorough.

The second reason, though, is that I want to hear how the words sound. I want to hear the flow of the words, sentences, and paragraphs. How does it sound? Because the process of reading, for me, is auditory. I hear the words in my head, even if I’m reading silently. It is important, then, in my own writing process, that I make sure the words sound how I want them.

This may go a long way towards explaining why I prefer writing dialogue to other parts of the narrative. Dialogue most obviously is auditory in nature. It’s the easiest for me to hear in my head. And it is the easiest for me to produce. Descriptions, movement, action… All are difficult for me to produce. I don’t know how those should sound.

I love reading to other people. Taking the prose on the page and bringing it to life is a simple pleasure. A form of story-telling, perhaps, though more story sharing. When I wrote poetry, I wrote intending it to be spoken, not simply stared at on a page. And I think I approach my prose in a similar way.

“Excuse me?”

“I said, turn that OFF!”

“But it is GOOD.”

“Who says?”

“I did. Just now.”

“Who are you?”

“Me? Well, I AM…”

“Never mind. Just turn it off.”

“But I declared it GOOD.”

“Look. You can’t just move in here and start . . . illuminating everything. You need to show some consideration for your neighbors.”

“. . .”

“I get it. I do. You have this new fangled toy, and you want to play with it. I’m the same way. Just last week. . . Well, that doesn’t matter. I just annoyed the gal two houses down. Not a good situation.”

“So even though this is GOOD, I should turn it off?”

“Well, you don’t have to get rid of it. Use it during normal hours. Maybe turn it on for a bit, and then off. And give us some heads up. You could turn it on slowly. That way we all know it’s coming.”

“I guess I could do that.”

“We could even name the periods you have it on, and when you have it off.”

“Names?”

“Sure. Come up with something.”

“How about ‘The Shining Brilliance of Daystar’?”

“That’s a mouthful. Let’s just call it ‘day.’ Much easier to remember.”

“Day?”

“Sure. Now what about when it’s off?”

“Uh… ‘Nigh the… day?’”

“You are a wordy bugger, aren’t you. ‘Night.’ Same idea, but only one syllable. One syllable is good.”

“So ‘day’ and ‘night’?”

“Sounds good. Now. It’s night. And I’m trying to sleep. So. Turn. It. OFF!”

Also, I wonder about my GPS. Ronni thinks the voice sounds sad or resigned when it is forced to recalculate your route (because you didn’t follow its directions). For my part, I have fun making it recalculate. After all, I know it has a route in mind, but I’ve already decided on my route with Google Maps. The GPS is just back-up. It took about a mile before it finally capitulated to my route. It spent that mile trying to get me to make turns so that I would wind up back on its preferred route. It did sound a little resigned when it finally accepted my new path.

Which makes me wonder… Why do I have three devices with GPS capability, including an actual dedicated GPS, and I still get directions from Google Maps that I print out at home before setting out on the road? Doesn’t that seem like overkill?

The truth is what it is. It may be hard to form an accurate picture of reality, but it’s there, objective. Meaning, though, is far more difficult to pin down. No one singular meaning can be assigned.

I once apologized to someone for something that had happened years earlier. For me, it was a great source of shame and regret. For the other, it was as though it had never happened. They didn’t even remember the slight.

Did it happen? Of course. They didn’t deny its occurrence. But the importance it had held for me was completely absent for the other. Something that had been of great significance in my world, had had little apparent effect on the other person involved.

It happened to both of us, but meant something very different to each of us. The objective occurrence is there to be observed (given the appropriate perspective in space-time), but the meaning of the event is not fully determined merely by the objective facts.

The same is true for every person, place, or event. Everyone I meet is likely to be important to someone, even if they make little impression on my life. Every place I go, someone calls home, even if it’s just a waypoint on my journey.

Even the people and places that are important to me now, may not have been important years ago, or vice versa. Meaning is not only subjective, but it is in perpetual motion, changing as we change.

Too often, we conflate meaning with objective reality. Or the other way around.

There are reasons to dislike Senator Byrd. He had a racist past that, though he apologized for it repeatedly, we shouldn’t whitewash. He made sure to bring home the pork for West Virginia. But he stood up for the Constitution. And he was, for me, a shining star of hope in opposing the war in Iraq. His opposition may not have carried the day, but at least he was willing to stand up for what was right in the face of so much opposition.

In spite of his (distant) past, I had a lot of respect for Senator Byrd. He was a principled man we don’t see enough of in Washington these days. May he rest in peace.

As a result, I have the distinct feeling that there is something I ought to be doing, but I cannot remember what it is.

This is one of the pitfalls I expected as I embark on my sabbatical. Sure I can get work done that I’ve wanted to get done for a long time now. What I’m not certain of is whether I can psychologically deal with all of this unstructured time. I am so used to having all of my time taken up with class preparation and grading, I am so used to feeling that, when I’m not working, there is more work I could be doing. Now that I don’t have that, that the work that needs doing is getting done, and there isn’t more to do beyond it, I find myself uneasy.

I admit I have trouble relaxing during the school year. I get as much done as I do because I work in a state of high anxiety: constantly aware of deadlines and how much work yet remains. Now that I am actually free to relax a little, I find myself almost completely incapable of it. My hope is that, over time, my body and mind will learn that it’s okay to relax, and I will. If only a little.

People want to pass a law against gay rights… They want to sign a petition supporting that law… But they don’t want anyone to know that they oppose gay rights?

That was apparently the position of anti-gay activists in Washington State. The believe in their position, but not enough to actually admit it publicly. Their argument was that they would be harassed.

So the Supreme Court got to decide whether people who signed petitions to place initiatives on the ballot had a right to keep their signature private as a protection of free speech. (As an aside, I always enjoy the absurdity of wanting free speech and insisting that their free speech requires keeping their identity secret.) And, on an 8-1 vote, they decided that there was not a blanket protection against revealing the identity of those who signed petitions.

For me, the most surprising part of the decision was something Justice Scalia wrote…

Sign a political petition? Supreme Court says the public can know:

Justice Antonin Scalia, concurring in the judgment, said he was not impressed by the plaintiff’s fear of threats and intimidation. There are laws against threats, he said, and harsh criticism is a price one must be willing to pay for self-governance.

“Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed,” he said. “I do not look forward to a society which… campaigns anonymously” and conducts petition initiatives “hidden from public scrutiny and protected from the accountability of criticism.”

Scalia added: “This does not resemble the Home of the Brave.”

I honestly never thought I would agree with Scalia about anything, but I must say, I think he’s dead on this time.

13 Internation Relations 3181 y.C. 
(only 819 years to the Millenium!)

The revival of group hatreds in this country has dismayed and even frightened me ever since it began in the late 1960s.

When I was in high school and college, in the late 1940′s – early 1950′s we all remembered Hitler very well. Teachers taught us that Hitler was terrible, not because he hated the wrong group, but because hating any group is illogical, unscientific and leads ultimately to violence. Groups are grammatical fictions; only individuals exist, and each individual is different. Sometime while I was busy and didn’t notice, Political Correctness took over Academia and they stopped teaching that. They started teaching that Hitler was terrible because he hated the wrong group, but it’s okay to hate other groups.

Logic has nothing to do with it; logic itself is now suspect (just as it was in Nazi Germany.)

This rebellion against rationality originally intended to make Radical Feminism and its doctrine of male fungibility respectable, and it succeeded, at least in the major media, but it also made fungible group hatred respectable in general. Now the anti-Semites and all the other hate mongers are crawling out from under their rocks, and Academia does not have the ammunition to argue against them. Academia cannot argue the rational principle that hatred of any group does not make sense; they dumped that when they dumped logic (as a “male” perversion.) 

The argument between Left and Right now consists only of debating which are the correct groups to hate. 

I actually wrote several paragraphs about why this passage really stuck with me, both when I first read it and again when I came across it yesterday. I think I’ll keep those to myself for now, and let you, the reader, make of this what you will.

Camus begins The Myth of Sisyphus with an absurd reasoning. This reasoning – and the book as a whole – begins with the following line: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” Camus is interested in discovering whether, in the absence of God – or any transcendent meaning whatsoever, life is worth living.

This question, as Camus explains in the opening paragraph, must be answered:

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. . . . And if it is true, as Nietzsche claims, that a philosopher, to deserve our respect, must preach by example, you can appreciate the importance of that reply, for it will precede the definitive act.

I have spent most of the last twenty years or so pondering this “fundamental question of philosophy.” Indeed, I think it goes at least some way toward explaining how I got into philosophy in the first place. While Camus believes he found an answer, that life is worth living even more so because there is no transcendent meaning, I am still searching for an answer.

What bothers me is not my own lack of an answer, not at this point at least. Instead, I am troubled by the attitude that suicide is only for stupid people. Or, more generally, that suicide is a sign of obvious defect. Something must be wrong for someone to commit suicide.

I do believe that suicide is sometimes the consequence of mental illness (though I am suspicious of the claim that it is the consequence of lack of intelligence). But I am open to the claim that suicide may be a rational response to the world. Has anyone ever committed suicide as a result of a thoughtful, reasoned deliberation? I do not know for sure. But I believe it conceivable.

Many people speak as though it is obvious that we should want to live. It is the norm. It is expected. When someone raises questions about wanting to live, we immediately seek to get them help. Living is our natural state, so clearly we should all want to live. As long as possible.

But why? Why do we default to the assumption that everyone who is normal wants to be alive, and thus anyone who isn’t sure – or surely doesn’t – must be broken? Is it really so obvious? Must it be crazy to decide that life isn’t worth living? Or to even ask the question?

In more than 20 years thinking about the issue, I still have no answer. And I do wonder if I would be condemned as crazy for even wanting to ask. But I still do. If that makes me stupid or crazy, so be it.

Jerusalem revives plan to raze Palestinian homes: “Jerusalem planning body on Monday approved a plan to raze 22 Palestinian homes in east Jerusalem to make room for an Israeli tourist center…”

Whether you agree with its military actions to enforce the blockade of Gaza, the actions in Jerusalem seem to be nothing more than throwing gasoline on the fire. Israel apparently has no interest in making future peace negotiations possible.

What does the U.S. intend to do? Do we want to help Israel to impose its will on the entire Middle East? Will that help us in our war on terror? Or do we need to finally stand up and tell Israel no, that this is a step too far?

Even if you mistakenly believe the U.S. can do no wrong, surely that mistaken political naivete should not be extended to Israel, as well. But our government has repeatedly shown a lack of willingness to stand up to our ally and demand that they behave like a responsible international citizen.

I’m sure, of course, that Palestinian extremists, such as Hamas, will respond in such a way that will further escalate the situation. With two sides behaving so irrationally, it’s amazing there are are still people left to fight over the land.

To be fair, there are a lot of moments. Many different moods and feelings that seem significant in some way. For me, most of these are after the sun has set.

In this case, it is a moment after I’ve gotten into bed and settled in for a long night of insomnia. I may have the television on. Or not. I may have the computer open. Or not. But those details tend not to matter.

The moment comes when I feel as though anything is possible. Day light is a limiting factor. Day light defines. Definition means actuality. Actuality is the death of possibility. The vagueness inherent in the blackness of night could hold anything.

When everything is possible, nothing is certain, nothing definite. I think it may be why it is difficult to sleep. Knowing that there are only a few short hours before the sun rises and sets the world back into stone, I don’t like wasting the chance to capture the many worlds available in the dark. It one of those “points of time where the confines of the waking world blend with the world of dreams.”*

It is a moment… Nothing more. But nothing less. Moments need to be acknowledged and listened to.

* “A Dream within a Dream” by The Alan Parsons Project

But rather than attacking BP, he engaged in the favorite pastime of politicians these days, attacking the White House. Not for failing to keep BP within regulatory bounds as some have done. Rather, he attacked the White House for trying to hold BP financially accountable for its complete disregard for people and the environment.

Lawmakers confront BP CEO over Gulf oil disaster:

Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, the senior Republican on the Energy and Commerce Committee, said he agreed with the call of Democrats on the panel for answers. But Barton accused the White House of conducting a ‘$20 billion shakedown’ by requiring oil giant BP to establish a fund to compensate those hurt by the Gulf Coast oil spill.

‘I’m ashamed of what happened in the White House’ on Wednesday, Barton said.

Unfortunately, it is unclear to me what Barton would prefer. Does he think there should be no consequences for BP’s actions? Should the private companies he is so eager to defend not be held accountable for the harms they inflict? If there are no consequences for BP, why would they do anything differently next time?

BP mismanaged a well allowing the spill to occur. Are government regulators to blame for not engaging in better oversight? Sure. But notice that also suggests that BP cannot be trusted to regulate itself. We need government regulations (properly enforced) to keep companies like BP in check.

After the spill, BP has shown nothing but ineptitude in trying to contain and control the problem. If they are not punished for their actions, if they do not compensate those they have harmed, why would they change their behavior in the future?

Barton has no suggestions, but he’s willing to attack the White House because it is politically expedient to do so. This is what passes for political leadership these days.

The most recent tangible example of my awesome friends arrived in the mail today…

I have often told my friend Devon that her zombie creations (which I’ve seen in pictures) are wild. She needs to sell them. Of course, that probably means devoting a lot more time to knitting, which would cut into her gaming time. So I understand if she doesn’t want to. But she bestowed one of her creations on me.

The pink thing (she explained) were brains, in case the little guy gets hungry. I wouldn’t want him eyeing the cats. The hat comes off. And the right leg is a different color (because it’s rotting, obviously).

Very, very cool. Thanks, Devon! And if you do ever start selling them, I will plug them here.