With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy - I mean that if you are happy you will be good.
Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.
The only way to find the limits of the possible is by going past them into the impossible.
July 16, 2009 - 2:04 a.m.
One of these days I'll get back to updating in the morning but for now I'm doing the late night entries.
I actually went out today. I had to move the car this afternoon so it would be parked legally tomorrow so as long as I had to drive I went shopping at the good stores. Not only did I go to Stop & Shop and Trader Joe's I went to Home Depot and bought a window fan. I've wanted one for ages but I couldn't use them in my old house because it had casement windows. I managed to install it with one arm and it is making a tremendous difference. My apartment is so much more comfortable tonight than it's been. The key is that I have it set to exhaust. A fan is far more effective blowing out than in. It is in my bedroom and the cool outside air is blowing in from the living room where I'm sitting now. When I go to bed I'll close the bedroom door and the breeze will blow across my room from the two windows.
My other important purchase was ice cube trays. They will help me lose weight. How? I'll start making iced coffee, that will be my staple drink. Now I'm having egg creams. Iced coffee has far fewer calories.
I cooked dinner tonight for the first time since I broke my elbow. I made a chicken cutlet and a baked potato, far healthier than I've been eating. I had a banana for desert. Cooking wasn't the easiest thing and I might go back to eating out tomorrow.
Driving proved no problem. Now that my wrist is so improved I can use my left hand to turn the wheel but not to close the car door. I'll still try to not push things.
I missed John Platt's On Your Radar last night. That was unusual enough to merit notice. People commented at the show and on Facebook. I have to admit that I like that.
Tomorrow night I'm going to end my internal exile and go to a concert. I'm seeing the beautiful and talented Kristin Andressen. "Beautiful and talented" is a cliché but in Kristin's case it is true. It's true of remarkably many of my friends.
I watched Paul McCartney on the Letterman show tonight. I went in jaded but it was great. Sir Paul is 69 years old and a knight of the realm but he isn't an institution. He still comes across as a 12-year-old boy. He was funny and natural and utterly charming. Not only that but he can still rock.
Enough personal minutiae; I have an actual idea I want to write about. I wish I could remember its genesis. I don't remember the original point I wanted to make. I'll do the best I can.
Lena has been talking a lot about 1776 and that probably has a lot to do with it. I was thinking in particular about this speech of Ben Franklin's.
We've spawned a new race here, Mr. Dickinson. Rougher, simpler; more violent, more enterprising; less refined. We're a new nationality. We require a new nation.
Franklin is often called the first American and here he is discussing what it means to be an American. So much of it is still true but I don't think it gets to the essence. America is about reinvention. In much, perhaps most, of the developed world you take tests in high school and the rest of your life is mapped out on that basis. In France if you don't make it into one of the elite universities, that's it. You spend the rest of your life under a low ceiling. In America that is unacceptable. If you screw up in high school you can turn yourself around and go into a community college and after you can get your AA and even get into an elite university. People make total changes in their careers. How many people do you know that have jobs that have nothing to do with their undergraduate degree?
This makes sense considering our history. The country was founded by people that left their homelands and set out to a New World in both a literal and figurative sense. They got to start completely over. For over a century that pattern could continue within the country as people moved from the settled east into the western frontier.
People in the west now often think they are the heirs of the frontier spirit and by extension the American ideal. They aren't there is no more frontier. That doesn't mean that the frontiersman have no heirs. The modern equivalents are the immigrants, the people that so many "real Americans" despise. They are the ones that have risked everything to reinvent themselves here. The illegals from Mexico in the great American tradition made the epic journey to get here. Immigrants are not the freeloaders they are depicted as but a tremendous engine of industry. This is obvious from a New Yorker's point of view. I walked now in Flushing, and area that had been in decline, and now the streets are packed with people, people buying, people selling, people creating wealth. The energy is tangible. On the Simpsons the real symbol of America is not Homer, it is not Flanders, it is Apu. He is the one following in the footsteps of Ben Franklin.
Franklin is the prototype of the reinvented American. He started as a runaway apprentice who fled from his native Boston to Philadelphia, where he could start over. Through his skill and enterprise he advanced from journeyman printer, to master printer, to the head of a printing empire. He fed his printing business with his writing. He became the most influential writer in the colonies. Then he decided that he had enough money and that it was time to help mankind. He didn't try to do it with money, as people do today. He became an inventor. He invented the lightning rod, the Franklin Stove, and bifocals. He didn't patent any of them because his goal wasn't to make money but to help humanity. He then became a public leader, then a statesman, then a diplomat. His hand was everywhere in the nation's early days. He spent his life changing who he was. That is the essence of being an American.
I'm on page three and my arm is only beginning to twinge. I'm actually getting better.
Falcon Ridge 2009 - July 28, 2009
Fralcon Ridge Bound - July 22, 2009
The Iliad & the Odyssey - July 20, 2009
It's not a tax, it's a user fee. - July 19, 2009
We Now Return to My Regularly Scheduled Life - July 17, 2009
Email me: GordonLew at gmail
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Horvendile July 16, 2009
