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Worcester, Massachusetts
Currently: 23°F Heavy Snow

Wind: West at 20.0 MPH
Humidity: 80.0%
Dewpoint: 18°F
Barometer: 29.96 inches and rising
Wind Chill: 8°F

I beg to differ on the "heavy snow" - the flakes are barely bigger than the dust you'd see in a beam of sunlight. But it is bitter, bitter cold.

11:51:27 AM      trackback [] 

Love, hate, and reconciliation

Yesterday I picked up Time magazine (Dec. 1) as I was in the checkout line at Border’s. The cover has a photo of George Bush with a lipstick kiss added to one cheek and a black eye on the other side. The checkout guy, who was maybe 20 years old, said to me disgustedly, “I don’t know how they allow Time to get away with that. I guess they’re so big and powerful they can do what they want.” I pointed out to him that there was both a kiss and a black eye and that the whole point of the article (I skimmed while waiting) was to show both sides of the divide.

The clerk’s knee-jerk reaction illustrated the article's thesis, that Bush is “a one-man Rorschach test for what kind of nation we want to be and what kind of President we want to have.” One look at the cover and this guy saw his beloved President defamed and the defamers guilty of being unpatriotic or worse. I see a guy who has divided the country through his arrogance and who encourages people like this clerk to believe the undemocratic notion that it’s unpatriotic to speak out against the President and his policies.

I read most of the article over a cup of tea in the café, but I could feel my blood boiling. It’s so easy to get sucked into the vortex of anger and divisiveness that swirls around the country right now. Then I remembered some bits of Thich Nhat Hanh that Chris Corrigan and others have posted (see here and here). So I went back into the bookstore and picked up Creating True Peace and decided to spend at least a little bit of every day offsetting the prevailing anger with peace and reconciliation.

I think that increasingly people are craving a counterbalance to the rhetoric of hatred and war. There are people working for peace outside of the mainstream, such as the Geneva Middle East unofficial peace accord that has been three years in the making and is now launching a broad, international promotional campaign. The right-wing Israeli government under Sharon is trying to subvert it, but the hope it offers in such a vacuum may be too powerful to ignore. If successful, it would offer a much better example of stability in the region than the war-mongering neocons could ever dream up.

9:36:59 AM      trackback []