Bailey Colorado Terror

My dear friend and writing partner Rich Van Pelt is speaking at the Bailey Colorado Community Worship Service tonight. Last night he asked what I would say if I were in his shoes. These are the reflections I sent him.

No one should ever have to think about such things. Everyone does.

• This is awful and totally without reason. no one in this community had this coming. we don't know much about the person who did this but we know he really and truly did evil here -- no excuses.

• Feel what you're feeling. there's not a right way to feel in reaction to your personal experience this week. But there may be a wrong way: if you stuff it; if you deny it; if you pretend that it affects you more or less or other than it actually is affecting you, that's not healthy, that's not fair to you and it's not fair to your friends and family and neighbors.

• On the other side of that is assuming everyone is having the same reaction to this experience that you are. Please be honest about your thoughts and feelings and generous about the thoughts and feelings other people express -- including the sure knowledge that people will do and say things they'll think twice about later. That's ok: getting your bearings in this kind of emotional storm sometimes includes taking some steps in a direction that won't lead you home. Please don't be afraid to backtrack a few steps and look for the path that will get you back where you belong.

• If I were the flight attendant on an airplane, one of the things i would tell you is what to do in the event of a cabin depressurization. You may already know what i would say: I would tell you that a mask will fall from the panel above you and that you should place that mask firmly over your nose and mouth and -- crazy as it sounds -- do your best to breathe normally.

Then I would tell you to help the people with you secure their masks.

• So what is that mask that falls from the overhead panel at times like this? For starters, I'm convinced it's God's mercy in this most unlikely and unacceptable circumstance. I'm convinced God enters dark valleys like the one you're in right now, not to teach you a lesson but to comfort you by his presence and prepare you to comfort other people by your presence.

• I think you are oxygen to each other -- that you'll get through this together -- that five years from now it won't be outsiders you'll remember bringing help, it will be your classmates and your neighbors in this community. So, get your own mask in place and turn as soon as you can to help the people near you who are in distress.

• Telling each other the story of what you experienced physically and emotionally and spiritually will help you heal. It will, whether you think that's true or not. People who go through the kind of trauma you've experienced who honestly and thoughtfully tell their stories to each other bounce back way faster than those who choose to, or have to go it alone. Please be patient listeners for each other; please be open with your own story to help others be open with theirs.

I'm not talking about strangers and media people here; I'm talking about locals. The job the media are here to do may not help you with the work you need to do in the next few days. I'm not saying they're bad or badly intentioned; I'm just saying their job and yours may not be the same right now. And it will seem like work. This kind of emotional experience involves a lot of heavy lifting. So, if you're tired, sleepy, emotionally spent, there's a good reason for that.

• If you experience flashbacks, vivid memories, intrusive thoughts and nightmares -- those are very common responses to this level of trauma. If you experience emotional numbness or hyper-arousal, sleep disturbances, depression, anxiety, headaches, stomach complaints, dizziness, chest pain, irritability, outbursts of anger or feelings of intense guilt -- don't freak out; all those are normal in the first weeks after the kind of experience you've had.

If you're still experiencing these things when Halloween gets here a month from now, please tell someone trustworthy so you can get some more help. There are lots of professional people here to help you this week and some skilled non-professional helpers too. Some of them will be gone in month, but your school administrators and counselors and teachers and your youth workers and your family doctors will be able to help you get what you need for as long as you need help.

• We've all seen something we never wanted to see this week. We've seen something terrible that we never should have seen. This kind of thing is not supposed to happen, period. But it did, as such thing occasionally do -- and I'm really sad that it happened to you. Human beings are capable of so much that's good; so much that I believe reflects the goodness of our creator. Human beings are also capable of horrible evil that reflect our desperate brokenness. You're seeing ugliness you should never have to look at. I pray you will see goodness again very soon -- in fact, I pray that you will soon live goodness and spread it around like flower seeds. But first, you have to get through the days right in front of you, one day at a time.

• Do what you can to reflect the good and reject the evil. Do what you can to be there for each other -- you may be doing very well in a month but your friend or your teacher or parent may be in trouble. So do what you can to pay attention and be there to help someone else get help if she needs it.

Rich and I wrote The Youth Worker's Guide to Helping Teenagers in Crisis.

We are working on The Parent's Guide to Helping Teenagers in Crisis.

Next week (October 5-6, 2006) we are scheduled to teach eight hours on the subject at the Youth Specialties National Youth Workers Convention in Austin, a again next month in Anaheim, Cincinatti and Charlotte.

America reboots: two in a series . . .

America reboots: one in a series . . .

on teaching and learning . . .

Bill Evans is, I imagine, a master teacher after 17 years of teaching English to eigth graders at Manhattan's Trevor Day School.

Not that longevity is good for much other than getting old. But look what Mr Evan wrote in the New York Times:

. . . What I’m trying to say is, there’s something extremely tentative and fluid about the classroom situation. It is never, ever a sure thing. A teacher does his or her best to stack the odds in favor of success, and a consistently high level of success is definitely attainable, but a classroom is not a machine. Learning is essentially a private, almost secret, inner event, and schools are extremely public and social arenas that attempt to facilitate that event’s occurrence. Ideally, the friction between these two realities creates sparks. But learning is stubborn. It happens on its own schedule. It is extremely difficult to understand what one doesn’t understand, to see what one simply cannot see, and that’s the soil that learning sprouts out of, at least initially. But not to get hung up on horticultural metaphors — fortunately, learning is also explosive. Those sparks can do the trick, and do; I’m here to attest to it.

If teaching has taught me anything, it’s that learning happens. I’ve seen it repeatedly. I’ve grown to trust the process, and the longer I teach, the more comfortable I’ve become with the fact that I, as teacher, don’t seem to be in charge of this process at all. I am much more a witness, and when I’m really good, a facilitator. . . .

I can only add a phrase I've come to rely on (it's a skeleton next to Bill Evan's fully formed human — still, it helps me remember which end is up when I'm designing content):

People don't learn what they're supposed to learn. People learn what they're prepared to learn.

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip

Oh my gosh. Studio 60 is good enough to help me forget for an hour that I have to take back the acknowledgement I gave to Senators McCain, Graham and Warner for standing up to Mr Bush's assault on habeas corpus and the American Way. But they seem to have buckled and I'm deeply disappointed.

But I'm still grateful to Secretary Powell – who apparently won't be making the same mistake twice – and today I add my appreciation to General Batiste, Colonel Hammes and Major General Eaton for speaking the uncomfortable truth about the conduct of the war in Iraq.

This is one reason we need to have Democrats in the majority in at least one chamber of Congress: open hearings.

all is not lost

I know I'll get hit for suggesting "equivalencies" here, though I am always clear in stating that there is no equivalency between today's radical and extreme Muslims and today's ordinary Christians. But it must also be said that Christians, from the fourth to the eighteenth century, can match the Muslims one-for-one when it comes to having spread the faith with the sword. Read the history of the Christianization of Europe and you have to go hunting for that minority of the faithful who spread the faith without the sword, merely by witness and works.

We live today not in the time of Christian Crusades and Inquisitions, but in a time when the pope is needed as a bridge-builder, a link-maker. Having quoted claims seven centuries old that only "evil and inhuman" things were new in the program of the Prophet and in the name of Islam, it will be harder for the pope to have dialogue with the Muslims who do good and human things. Some on the Muslim and American right seem to be craving a war of civilizations, a war about which we know only one thing: Both sides (or the many sides) would lose.

Rather than point to the "evil and inhuman" nature of Islam's, Judaism's, Christianity's, Hinduism's, Buddhism's, and other holy wars, the pope will serve better if he can still find dialogue partners in search of the good and human. All is not lost. Yet.

— Martin Marty | Sightings | the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School | 09.18.06

why it's important to have a smart president

George Friedman, without ever saying so, makes it clear why it's important to have intelligent, experienced, carefully informed people in the White House.

Dr Friedman is the founder, chief intelligence officer, and chairman of a private intelligence and foreign affairs analysis company called Stratfor. He is the author of America's Secret War and The Future of War.

Before he entered the private business sector a decade ago, Dr Friedman taught political science for nearly 20 years during which he also briefed senior commanders in all the US armed services, the Office of Net Assessments, the U.S. Army War College, National Defense University and the RAND Corporation on security and national defense. In 1994 he founded the Center for Geopolitical Studies at Louisiana State University to conduct integrated economic, political and military modeling and forecasting. the Center was the only non-Department of Defense/non-governmental organization granted access to Joint Theater Level Simulation (JTLS) by the Joint Warfighting Center.

I write all that by way of introduction to Friedman's remarkable (and remarkably clear) analysis of how the US came to be where we are in Iraq — Iraq: The Policy Dilemma.

matter

"Listen here, if you don't vote, you don't matter! And then you're just as ignorant as them in the city say you are!"
— Willie Stark, All the King's Men, Columbia Pictures

just so we're clear

On September 15 Mr Bush was asked to comment on former Secretary of State Colin Powell's letter to Senator McCain:

QUESTION: Thank you, Mr. President. Mr. President, former Secretary of State Colin Powell says the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism. If a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former Secretary of State feels this way, don't you think that Americans and the rest of the world are beginning to wonder whether you're following a flawed strategy?

THE PRESIDENT: If there's any comparison between the compassion and decency of the American people and the terrorist tactics of extremists, it's flawed logic. I simply can't accept that. It's unacceptable to think that there's any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective, Terry.

Just so we're clear, Mr Bush, I don't think most people question the compassion and decency of the American people. It's your compassion and decency that's in question; it's your moral basis that's up for review. America is not so much on trial as you are.

At this stage of the game, I wonder if there's much you can do about that.

rose garden

Steve said what I was thinking, better than I was thinking it. So . . . I'll let him.

Friday, September 15, 2006
Dumbing up...

We were in the airport this morning, flying to Baltimore, to play a gig on a boat. As we sat waiting to board, I caught the president in the rose garden, taking questions from the press. I copied an important part here.
_____
QUESTION: Thank you, Mr. President. Mr. President, former Secretary of State Colin Powell says the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism. If a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former Secretary of State feels this way, don't you think that Americans and the rest of the world are beginning to wonder whether you're following a flawed strategy?

THE PRESIDENT: If there's any comparison between the compassion and decency of the American people and the terrorist tactics of extremists, it's flawed logic. I simply can't accept that. It's unacceptable to think that there's any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective, Terry.
_____
I think that he calls something "unacceptable" when he just can't comprehend the pot calling the kettle black. The definition of hypocrisy is this: The practice of professing beliefs, feelings, or virtues that one does not hold or possess; falseness. Maybe it isn't hypocrisy if he still somehow believes Islamic extremists are the only people who kill innocent women and children. I can hardly comprehend that. See the transcript.

posted by Flibbityflu at 11:24 PM

finally

Thank you Mr Powell, Mr McCain, Mr Graham, Mr Warner.

to give as good as we got

I'm sorry to keep doing this but really, isn't it time to pony up and join Salon Premium so you can read Garrison Keillor for yourself every Wednesday morning?

Since we're caught halfway between last Wednesday and next, here's an excerpt to tide you over . . .

Last week I sat and listened to a roomful of parents talk about their battles with public schools in behalf of their children who suffer from dyslexia, or apraxia, or ADD, or some other disability -- sagas of ferocious parental love vs. stonewall bureaucracy in the quest for basic needful things -- and how some of them had uprooted their families and moved to Minnesota so their children could attend better schools. You couldn't tell if those parents were Republicans or Democrats. They simply were prepared to move mountains so their kids could have a chance. So are we all.

And that's the mission of politics: to give our kids as good a chance as we had. They say that liberals have run out of new ideas -- it's like saying that Christians have run out of new ideas. Maybe the old doctrine of grace is good enough.

I don't get much hope from Democrats these days, a timid and skittish bunch, slow to learn, unable to sing the hymns and express the steady optimism that is at the heart of the heart of the country. I get no hope at all from Republicans, whose policies seem predicated on the Second Coming occurring in the very near future. If Jesus does not descend through the clouds to take them directly to paradise, and do it now, they are going to have to answer to the rest of us.
— Garrison Keillor, Our Magnificent Isolation, Salon.com, 09.06.06