Flight 93 Memorial groundbreaking

I’ve written before about the Families of Flight 93 and their tireless efforts to build a memorial on the site where their loved ones died trying to stop a horrendous attack. Yesterday the group broke ground on the new national park in Shanksville, PA, and I had the honor of attending. A beautiful day, a ceremony I thought was very appropriate and respectful.

The only negative was a man in the VIP section (which means he’d been invited) complaining to another man about new jobs in the federal government. He said that the last thing we needed was more government telling us what to do. I was sorely tempted to ask him why he bothered to attend this government event if he felt that way, but I didn’t want to mar the day.

If you haven’t been to the temporary memorial, I urge you to go. Listen to the ambassador tell you what happened and put yourself in the shoes of the people who acted that day—it will humble you.

 

Reality (tv)

I’ve been reading about the Heene family and that poor little kid. I’m making a guess that the father needs more than a little counseling to understand why all this fame stuff is not always a good thing. As I write this the sheriff is discussing felony charges . . . I thought we’d hear restitution for expenses, but I guess charges aren’t that much of a surprise.

But for some reason the speech from the movie “Meet John Doe” came to me. (Gary Cooper plays a down-and-out guy recruited by reporter Barbara Stanwyck to be “John Doe,” or Everyman. He reluctantly becomes famous when all he wanted was something to eat and a chance to play professional baseball.)

So I found the movie on YouTube and listened to the speech (if you click on the link, ignore the part about “Dead Zone”–it was the only clip I saw that had what I needed). And I realized that this speech has more to do with our society at large at the moment than it does with Richard Henne’s misguided attempts at fame.

Listening to people sit back and criticize the present administration without offering solutions or help or even just patience is really disheartening. We need to be building up, not tearing down. The president came into a mess eight years in the making. He’s not going to fix everything in—what is this?—nine months. He’s not perfect, but we elected him less than a year ago and we should be doing what we can to help instead of taking out the anger and frustration of the past 12 years on him.

So go meet that neighbor of yours. Offer some help to someone who needs it. (If you’re reading my blog, you already have far more than many, so go ahead and share.) Do something positive. I’ve always believed that if you put positive out there, positive will come back to you. But the same goes for negative.  Work at tearing things down and that’s what you’ll get. Positive works so much better.

 

Adieu

to this topic at least. It is with great relief that I can say that I won’t be posting anything about Joe Pizarchik’s nomination anymore. I don’ t have to. He’s been voted out of committee (pay close attention to what Chairman Bingaman says in the article). What have I learned from this experience? Plenty.

For starters, the Internet has allowed opinion to morph into “authority,” which is a real shame. Granted, newspapers have always had owners and ideologies and leanings one way or another. But am I naive to think that there was a time newspapers could be trusted to provide the facts? When I was a reporter, I always tried to get both sides of an issue represented (no matter what I thought of the issue). So many times, though, I was frustrated by someone who would say, “You won’t get it right so I’m not talking to you.” Even when I explained that the only way to get their voice heard in the debate was for them to talk to me, they wouldn’t listen. And I’d have to write that “Calls to ___ were unreturned” sentence. I hated that.

I also learned that hearing “it’s not personal,” no matter how many times, doesn’t make it so. This was an extremely painful experience for me. I will never understand some people’s motivations for what they did. I’ve certainly lost some of my willingness to trust.

I also lost my willingness to identify myself carte blanche as a liberal. As I’ve said, I thought these were my people, but my people wouldn’t act the way these folks have. So from now on I’m going to do a lot less mass-judgment (of which we are all guilty, of course) and more research and reflection before forming an opinion. I guess that’s a good thing.

And I’ll be using this experience as part of my freshman comp lessons for a while. I think I’ll ask my students to research Joe Pizarchik and see how many of them get to a real, credible source. I think we call that a teachable moment? Ha!

So it’s back to bears and rock stars and birds and marriage, back to music and movies and my dear mother and my dog. And book reviews, of course. Thanks for reading and hope you continue to!

 

End of the week

and here I am, editing notes (it’s my job). Been another rough one. Took my mother to the neurologist. Good report there. He’s got a very good manner with her and she likes him, so we never dread going. Ate Mexican food afterwards, then bought some sox. It’s the little things . . .

Tomorrow is four weeks since my dad died. I wonder how long I’ll tick off the weeks, will it turn to months soon?

Lovely cold rain today—over 2 inches. I thought the birds would feed like crazy, but they didn’t start til just a little bit ago.

I wish the anniversary of 9/11 would make people a little nicer to each other, but that’s not happening. How do we get rid of the negativity and poison that seem to be a part of daily life these days? I wish I knew.

 

Things I’ve learned in the past 10 days

I hate funeral voices. And I hate the question: “how are you doing?”

I like (maybe the word is “appreciate”?) sympathy cards. I just don’t like reading them.

My in-laws are among the best people on earth (okay, that one I’ve known before but they continue their standing . . . ).

My mother is a wise woman (yes, I knew that, too, but still . . . ).

 

Truth and civility

This is the beginning of Maureen Dowd’s column today:

If I read all the vile stuff about me on the Internet, I’d never come to work. I’d scamper off and live my dream of being a cocktail waitress in a militia bar in Wyoming.

If you’re written about in a nasty way, it looms much larger for you than for anyone else. Gossip goes in one ear and out the other unless you’re the subject. Then, nobody’s skin is thick enough.

“The velocity and volume on the Web are so great that nothing is forgotten and nothing is remembered,” says Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic. “The Internet is like closing time at a blue-collar bar in Boston. Everyone’s drunk and ugly and they’re going to pass out in a few minutes.”

 

August 1, 2009

The world is officially insane. I don’t know why, but crazy has taken hold and it’s not letting go. The evidence supporting my claim follows:

1. I cannot be president. Let’s just let go of the fact that I am a woman and God knows this country can’t handle that right now. (The treatment of both Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin has proved that. ) No, I cannot be president because I cannot produce my original birth certificate. As I wrote a few months ago, I never had an “original” birth certificate. My mother always said that New York State didn’t issue them in the 1950s, and we always used my baptismal certificate and that always got me where I needed to be. Before I applied for my passport, I had to request an official copy of my birth certificate from New York State.  They sent it to me (and then I discovered that my name was not what I have always thought it to be). But it’s not the original. And so I cannot be president. (And BTW neither can any person born in Hawaii since 1908 with poor filing habits since Hawaii went paperless and destroyed all their originals.)

2. People are questioning Joe Pizarchik’s ethics. I’ve known Joe for almost 34 years. Calling him “corrupt” or “unethical” or (my favorite) “slick” would be laughable if there weren’t people out there who believed it. Joe Pizarchik is honest, decent, ethical. Anyone who says anything different about him is either lying or  just plain wrong (meaning they are just repeating something they heard instead of trying to find out the truth for themselves).

3. I need a third one because there should always be a third one. I could do the Beer Summit but when my hairdresser went off about the arrest she made no sense and so I don’t even think I can comment. How about the PA state employees not getting a paycheck for a month? They’re not getting paid just because the Republicans are saying “no new taxes” and the Dems are saying “we need to pay for these things SOMEHOW!” No one seems to understand the concept of working together to achieve a common goal (meaning passing a budget). Get it together, people! You’re not making yourselves more popular this way, believe me.  And, as I’ve already informed my representative,  this stupid stonewalling won’t be forgotten come election time.

So these three items should convince my readers: the world is now officially, unequivocally insane.

. . .  Oh wait, I just remembered the “we’re headed toward socialism” charge from people who don’t know what the word “socialism” means. I challenge them all to define it for me, as I would ask any of my freshman college students to do—give me a definition and then examples. Tell me what you’re talking about because I don’t know what you mean.

 

June 13, 2009

I just want to say thank you or bravo or something like that to Stephen Colbert. His trip to Iraq was, in my opinion, phenomenal. Our soldiers do an incredibly difficult job and we don’t recognize them enough. I’m only sorry the puppies and ice cream idea didn’t work out.

 

Lexicon

I just edited another book with this issue and figured this would be a good place to say it. In this country people whose ancestors came from Africa are (presently) called “African Americans.” People whose ancestors lived in what is now the United States before the first Europeans landed are called “Native Americans.” Yet people whose ancestors came from Europe are just called “white.” If our culture insists on labeling some people by continent of origin, I think we all should be labeled that way. So those considered “white” should be “European Americans.” It just makes sense.