Unlinked | Will American Millennials Reboot Marriage and Parenting?

This week, the Pew Research Center reported on the attitudes of 18-29 year-old Americans toward parenting and marriage. In a nutshell, the study found that being good parents is more important to a majority of these Americans than having a successful marriage. You can read the report for yourself.

Not in the report is what I thought I caught … whispered between the lines … floating on the wind... 

I wrote it down as I heard it, but maybe it was only in my mind….

Generation OMG

And this, from the New York Times writer Kate Zernike

Chimpanzee Riding on a Segway

a last word on November 3, 2008

posting via iPhone tonight (please pardon any thumbing mistakes) from Pennsylvania where Susan and I are enjoying a few days with her father, Dale.

Today, Dale -- who, at 89, recalls vividly what happened when Americans were willing to employ the strength of our elected government for the common good in another time of economic and political crisis -- put it as clearly as anyone could. "If people like what George Bush has done the last eight years, they should vote for John McCain. If they don't like the last eight years, Obama is their man."

I find no fault in that summary. Senator McCain isn't President Bush but I think he's too close for comfort. Beyond that, I hardly know who he is. Certainly not the Senator who had my grudging respect in the 90s. Senator McCain surrendered significant ground to the Bush Administration on the constitutional doctrine of habeas corpus and historic legal prohibitions prohibiting torture. Senator McCain's lack of curiosity and discernment about economics -- especially after his involvement in the costly Keating financial scandal is disheartening. And then there's the selection of Governor Palin, a choice in which I find no upside.

I don't wish to demonize Senator McCain; I just don't think he's the right person to lead our government.

I like Senator Obama on foreign affairs. I like him on the Constitution, on health care, on tax policy, on the economy (though I feel confident we're in for tough sledding in the economy no matter what). In short, I'm more confident in Senator Obama's worldview than Senator McCain's. Perfect? Of course not. But, as far as I'm concerned, much better.

That's why I voted for Senator Obama in early balloting. It's why Dale will vote for Senator Obama at his polling place tomorrow.

Don't be afraid. This way to the future.

big in Japan

wait for it...

here we go

Mothers Day + 24

My friend Renee — who, God knows, is acquainted with grief on Mothers Day — posted an ancient poem from Hesiod:

Gaia, the beautiful, rose up,
Broad blossomed, she that is the steadfast base
Of all things. And fair Gaia first bore
The starry Heaven, equal to herself,
To cover her on all sides and to be
A home forever for the blessed Gods.

This, Renee accompanied with verse of her own, including the lines:

i’ve always loved pictures of the earth taken from space.
not just the half-slivered ones, but the full globe,
blue and white and luminescent amidst the blackness.

All of which reminded me, a motherless son in these years, of this from the eighth chapter of the letter to the Romans:

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.

Yes. Waiting. Still.

Radiohead | All I Need

All I Need
MTV Exit Foundation, Radiohead
Agency: Colman Rasic Carrasco
Creative: Rebecca Carrasco, Dejan Rasic

Malaria Bites

Below, you'll find the digital movie I made with Compassion and Youth Specialties (and the talented Brian Boyle) as the year began.

In 1983, when I first engaged the conversation about ending poverty, the working number of deaths due to preventable causes was about 42,000 per day — these are fatalities statisticians lump together as excess deaths, meaning they don't have to happen. Causes of excess deaths include war, water-borne illnesses, preventable and treatable infections — things like that. In 2007, despite all hell breaking loose in a lot of places on planet earth, the number of excess deaths was about 27,000 a day. 27,000 needless deaths every day is stunning and inexcusable. It's also a third fewer than in 1983. As Scott Todd, the very bright man who directs Compassion's Special Operations (including HIV/AIDS and Malaria Interventions) told me: "If we can shrink it from 40,000 to 27,000, there's no reason to believe we can't shrink it from 27,000 to zero."

This video describes in four and a half minutes how malaria deaths — about a million of them a year and way more children than adults — can be stopped cold for less money than the U.S. spends every week in Iraq.



This is as close to a no-brainer as I've ever seen...
Malaria bites. Buy a net. Save a life. Bite Back

yes they/you/i/we can

12 minutes well-spent, if only to ask, "What am I doing that contributes to this kind of hope?"

we think...

[thanks Brian]

"Americans need real change."

We may not know the final outcome of today's voting until morning, but the results so far make one thing clear.

When the dust settles from today's contests, we will maintain our substantial lead in delegates. And thanks to millions of people standing for change, we will keep adding delegates and capture the Democratic nomination.

We knew from the day we began this journey that the road would be long. And we knew what we were up against.

We knew that the closer we got to the change we seek, the more we'd see of the politics we're trying to end -- the attacks and distortions that try to distract us from the issues that matter to people's lives, the stunts and the tactics that ask us to fear instead of hope.

But this time -- this year -- it will not work. The challenges are too great. The stakes are too high.

Americans need real change.

In the coming weeks, we will begin a great debate about the future of this country with a man who has served it bravely and loves it dearly. And we will offer two very different visions of the America we see in the twenty-first century.

John McCain has already dismissed our call for change as eloquent but empty.

But he should know that it's a call that did not begin with my words. It's the resounding call from every corner of this country, from first-time voters and lifelong cynics, from Democrats and Republicans alike.

And together you and I are going to grow this movement to deliver that change in November.

Thank you,

— from Barack Obama, overnight, March 4, 2008

change

“What shall we find the other side of the walls of the world we are abandoning?

“Fear will come upon us – a void, a vast emptiness, freedom – how are we to go forward not knowing where we are going, how face loss, not seeing hope of gain?... If Columbus had reasoned thus he would never have weighed anchor. It was madness to set off upon the ocean, not knowing the route, on the ocean on which no one had sailed, to sail toward a land whose existence was doubtful. By this madness he discovered a new world. Doubtless if the peoples of the world could simply transfer themselves from one furnished mansion to another and better one – it would make it much easier; but unluckily there is no one to get humanity’s new dwelling ready for it. The future is even worse than the ocean – there is nothing there – it will be what men and circumstances make it."

— Alexander Herzen, quoted by Leo Tolstoy in The Kingdom of Heaven is Within You: Christianity Not as a Mystic Religion but as a New Theory of Life, New York, Cassell Publishing Company, 1894, p 157

oh, no you can't | like hope, but different

[thanks JP]

yes, yes we can

We may not, but we can.

yes we can

I've been out of the loop for a bit—a long story I'll try to tell as soon as Kara Powell and I deliver the updates and revisions for a new edition of our sexuality curriculum, Good Sex, for Youth Specialties.

But I did find time tonight to listen, and nod my head, to the words of Barack Obama in South Carolina. He's talking about an American ideal I remember; an American ideal I want to help reclaim and burnish to a bright and shining state. I choose to ignore the weary and cynical who say it can't be done. I say it can and must be done—and we must do it.

Burn the 18 minutes it takes to watch this speech. And don't tell me you don't want this too.

don't rearrange the deck chairs...

what's not to like?

the music is not in the piano . . .

I am not here to compete with Warner Music (NYSE:WMG). I am not here to sign 300 bands because 2 will pay for the other 298. By the end of the year, we hope to have signed 6 acts. We are just utilizing our real estate to further develop artists. We sign and introduce bands through games and make them available to people globally. Young people want to take music from the game and buy it for their phone or iPod. I am in the music 2.0 business.
— Steve Schnur | Worldwide Executive of Music and Marketing, Electronic Arts | Fast Company | July 2007 | page 26

Buckminster Fuller told Mike Vance: "You never change anything by fighting it; you change things by making them obsolete through superior technology." ( Mike Vance + Diane Deacon | Think Out of the Box | Career Press | 1997 | page 138)

Jesus told this parable:

No one tears a patch from a new garment and sews it on an old one. If he does, he will have torn the new garment, and the patch from the new will not match the old. And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins. And no one after drinking old wine wants the new, for he says, ‘The old is better.’” — Luke 5.36 - 39

When I think about it for a moment I see how much this has to say about yesterday's post on Emerging Grace.

[The title of this post is widely attributed to Clement Mok though, for the life of me, I can't find the source.]

Shift Happens

Sources from Karl Fisch