News flash: Governor Sarah Palin's son with Down Syndrome is a person. Film at 11!

The attacks on governor Palin and her family based on her son with Down Syndrome did not come as any surprise to me. When I heard of the nomination, I knew it would be hours (minutes) before some hostile anonymous (always anonymous as cowards always are) person was using every variant of insult to people with Down syndrome and their families. For some reason, parenting a child with DS makes everything about your family a matter of public interest to some people.

I started this post by linking to the worst of the the screed, people who bitched that Sarah Palin "whelped a retard" and "put a burden on society," but decided that these hateful pricks already get more attention than they deserve. If you want to read this stinking garbage, you'll have little trouble finding it. (Except for the sites that figured out they crossed the line, and disappeared the posts without bothering to apologize. Cowards. You know who you are.)

It's not alway people on the left who feel obligated to make DS mean something. I get approached in public with my daughter by people on both sides of the political spectrum. They try to bring the conversation around to whether I knew, uh, before she was born. If they are from the right, they are basically asking whether they need to venerate me. If they are from the left, they are trying to figure whether they really have to invest any emotional energy in feeling sorry for me. Thanks, kids. I don't need or want either.

I generally try to change the subject, because where my daughter is concerned I want to avoid making anyone uncomfortable around her and us. I don't want to hear, "Those families with handicapped kids are so self-righteous and easily offended!" However, for the record, what I really want to tell the abortion busy-bodies is:

1. That's really none of your F***ing business you rude little prick.
2. If you honestly can't get through this day without knowing my opinion on abortion, ask me directly and I'll be glad to tell you.
3. My daughter, who is standing right there, understands a whole lot more than you think. Do you mind if I ask if your children are a mistake right in front of them?

Number three is really the point. My daughter is a person. A person. Not an inanimate object. Not an issue. Not a debating point. Not a voter poll. Not a joke. Not a mistake. A person.

I'm particularly sorry for those on the left who feel that deleting any person who falls short of some societal expectation of perfection is allowable. I was raised with the understanding that people are not disposable. You stick it out for those you love, even it turns out to be a different movie than you think you bought a ticket to. Apparently many of us weren't given that kind of security in our families; some of us are very disposable if things were to go south.

You don't have to be born with a brain injury, by the way. Life can deal you one in the setting of an accident, illness or from aging. Since you feel so comfortable demanding that babies with DS not be a burden on society, I'm sure you will also volunteer for the gas chamber when you are less than perfect yourself. I'm just sayin'. Good for the goose . . . .

My daughter, like Trig, like her friends, is a person. She has an experience of life and a viewpoint that exist separately from mine and from yours. She sings and dances with her ipod. She laughs at our dogs' antics. She has a vibrant social life and a growing awareness of the world, a great sense of humor, an amazing memory and passion for art and beauty. And, unlike you, she has a profoundly amazing depth of compassion and interest in the people she meets. She also has a spiritual calling, a vocation before God, and dignity that are every bit as important as yours or mine.

And speaking of dignity, could we not all agree, left, right and center, to stop using terminology borrowed from the world of disabled children as a curse on our enemies? When Al Gore tried to show off how very clever he is by referring to his political opponents as "having an extra chromosome" and "riding the short bus," I chalked it up to his obvious complete lack of class. But this motif is now throughout the blogosphere. (C'mon, I know we have some creative people out there. Are there really no other terms you can find to use for people that annoy you? I generally have been a fan of the tag "Asshat." Somedays that says it all.) Unfortunately, you can't read an opinion piece on any site of either side, without words like Mongoloid and retard popping up in every other comment. They are using the medical condition that my beautiful daughter struggles with every day of her life as an insult and a curse.

Again, and I know I sound like a broke record here, she's a person. Not an insult. Not a curse.

A person.

Not the Triangle you are looking for!

Turns out Trekant or triangle in Danish, is the name for a certain kind of pornography. By my sitemeter most of my hits are people who are bound to be disappointed on arrival here as I don't, uh, cater to their tastes.

We started calling our house Trekant due to its very triangular theme.

Actually I now call my house "Casa Bankrupt" but that's a different story.


Should I change the name of my blog?

If I do I'll be down to only the hits from my one loyal reader in the Pacific islands. (Thank you whoever you are!)

Over the Rhine - Happy With Myself?

You ought to be happy with yourself!

Love this group - Over the Rhine. Check out their vids "All I get for Christmas is the blues" and "Hallelujah." Love them!

Mr. Monk learning computer

I'm having my own Monk technology moment. They took away my wonderful, simple cell phone with its 10 beautiful digits and a call/hang up button (built during the Clinton era I'm sure) and replaced it with a Blackberry Pearl.

Damn them!

I can't answer the phone without taking pictures of my ear instead. There are way too many buttons and functions for someone like me.

Me to my IT guy, "How can I possibly learn all of these new buttons - you're just going to make me get a new phone again in 8 years!"

Uh, ok. That was more than a little Monkish.

Storm over Pompeii by Stuck in Customs (Flicker) web site:http://www.treyratcliff.com/

For me, life is all about what you're reading right now. I tend to analyze my own thoughts and experience through the lens of a good book. Have you ever noticed that if you are reading two books at once (going back and forth between them over the course of a few days) that the experience of one colors the reading of the other?

Right now I'm finishing "Ghosts of Vesuvius" by Charles Pellegrino and reading for our Sabbath School class Frederick Buechner's "Secrets in the Dark," a summary of his life's work in sermons.

Pellegrino draws on his scientific and archeology background to discuss the tremendous destructive forces not only at Pompeii, but at the twin towers on 9/11 and on the hull of the Titanic. He has a childlike wonder at how surge clouds, those vectors of force generated in these catastrophic events can bypass one area as if it is protected by a force field and yet utterly strip bare and destroy something right next to it. In Pompeii's neighbor city, Herculaneum, he describes a crippled boy and a girl seated at a loom who were vaporized to ashes by a surge cloud. In an adjacent room of the same gem cutter's shop where they resided, fine inlaid wood furniture, expensive gems and other furnishings were untouched. Similar examples from ground zero and from the Titanic are equally astonishing.

Pellegrino is an agnostic who repeatly returns to spiritual imagery and themes as he explores these detructive events and the lessons they teach us about both history and the physical world. He compares the unawareness of the ancients to ours when disaster overtakes. As someone who has survived a grenade attack in Isreal and has witnessed the destruction of a jet plane raining down parts around him, he knows well that elasticity of time, that hyperawareness than we get when things are going strangely wrong. In that setting, a second seems to last minutes and a minute hours. We notice are record every detail. Have you ever had that happen to you in an emergency? I have and I think Pellegrino nails the description.

photo credit Mor (bncbits) Flickr

He even nails that way we try to continue on with normalcy, as if nothing is going on. The people of Pompeii and Herculaneum were sometimes, like the girl at the loom, found in the midst of very average daily activities despite the documentation of surviving observers that the volcano had been putting on a magnificent show for hours. A woman on the Titanic returns to tidy her stateroom before finally consenting to board a lifeboat. A man exiting a World Trade tower only precious minutes before its collapse steps into a puddle and thinks "I am ruining my new shoes." Then he is surprised by his next thought: "Today I am going to die in these shoes."

Turning from this book to Buechner's somewhat dark sometimes melancholy prose in "Secrets in the Dark," I feel something of the inevitable nature of the forces in our world, of decay and destruction but somehow written through with hope, a spiritual hope and secret longing for preservation, redemption, repair . . . .

He talks about how the smallest interactions trigger an awareness of just how absurd our world is. Traveling on a train, he spots a cigarette billboard ad: a beautiful picture of a couple enjoying a lakeside view juxtaposed with the surgeon general's warning. The ad exists to say "Buy this; it will kill you." He writes how that mundane sight jolted him to thought:

"The world is its own worst enemy, the ad said. The world, in fact, is its only enemy. No sane person can deny it, I think, as suddenly the picture on the wall of the train jolted me into being sane and being unable to deny it myself. The pretty girl and the good-looking boy. The lake and the trees in all their beauty. . . . . And, tucked in among it all, this small, grim warning that we will end by destroying ourselves if we're not lucky. We need no urging to choose what it that will destroy us because again and again we choose it without urging. . . . .'Buy this; it can kill you,' the pretty picture said and nobody on the train, least of all myself, stood up and said, 'Look, this is madness!' Because we are more than half in love with our own destruction. All of us are."

Later, traveling through Times Square, he feels revulsion at the waste of human life he sees laid bare there for all to see. What ultimately scares him is "to see suddenly how drawn we all are, I think, to the very things that appall us - to see how beneath our civilizedness, our religiousness, our humanness, there is that in all of us which remains uncivilized, religionless, subhuman and which hungers for precisely what Forty-Second Street offers, which is basically the license to be subhuman, not just sexually but any other way that appeals to us- the license to use and exploit and devour each other like savages, to devour and destroy our own sweet selves."

If the story ended there, it would be pretty desperate and sad. However, Buechner, who has not written another "all-sweetness-and-light pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps" Christian book travels the road of what is real about our world and returns home to his faith all the more committed and thoughtful because of it. He returns that day to the peace of his own home and reflects upon the definition of faith found in the book of Hebrews. "Faith is a way of looking at what is seen and understanding it in a new sense. Faith is a way of looking at what there is to be seen in the world and in ourselves and hoping, trusting, believing against all evidence to the contrary that beneath the surface we see there is vastly more that we cannot see."

This post is getting way too long - I think it's worth thinking about Faith and coming back on another day to finish.

I would recommend both books. You'll have to decide whether you want to read them side by side as I have done!

Winter doldrums

Our record snow half-melted this week, but the thaw was temporary. A constant wind roars up our ravine, rattling doors and swaying trees. It's hard to want to do much but sit by the fire. At last a moment to catch up on cataloguing my photos. A few from the archives:



What Chrstmas looked like here:

The puppies -

Do not let the sleepy angelic picture fool you. They are planning a crap attack.


And, finally, evidence to our ongoing committment here at the Trekant to all wholesome things triangular in nature:

Slowly, every so slowly, I am learning how to use photoshop to crop and lighten and to reduce picture size and to move pictures around. It's not lack of interest - it's lack of time that keeps me in the computer dark ages.

Brrrrr! The wind is howling. Time for a hot chocolate!

The Sea is Fear of Others

Oh, the raging of many nations—

they rage like the raging sea!

Oh, the uproar of the peoples—

they roar like the roaring of great waters!

Isaiah 17:12

Noting that many, particularly in the medical profession, have gone 'underground' with private blogs or gone offline altogether, and hearing that some have been threatened with disciplinary action at work or are afraid of lawsuits, reminds me that I never got to the fourth point of the Sea of Glass: The Sea is Fear of Others. Of course, this is not a criticism of what someone feels must be done with their blog to be prudent, but just a jumping off point for my contention that the fear of others is yet another thing from which God promises us deliverence.

The sound of water is, in many languages and cultures, a symbol of the voice of the crowd. We speak of a babbling brook or the roar of the ocean. We also describe the voices of many people as if it were water: think of surfing the net or the Jewish commentator writings described as a "Yam" or a great sea. This meaning of water is not extrinsic to the Bible. Interpretation of prophecy is given indicating that the waters are the voices of many peoples:

Revelation 17:15:

Then the angel said to me,

"The waters you saw, where the prostitute sits, are peoples,

multitudes, nations and languages.

Think how much we do in life for the audience (real or imagined) of other critics:

• What would you really do or say if there were no possible fallout from the opinion pool at home or work?


• How often do you keep your opinion to yourselve, allowing your beliefs to be submersed in the dominant culture?


• Who would you be if no one were looking?


• How many times have your motives been misunderstood?


• What is the thing that you were made to do, but are afraid to do?

On the day you meet God, the sea is frozen. There is no other who may intervene or make accusations against you. No critic or gossip pool exists. You may be fully known without fear of misunderstanding. Adam and Eve could be naked in the Garden, precisely because there was nothing shameful to hide. You too will have the opportunity, perhaps for the first time in your life, to be completely transparent, unafraid of what any other thinks, completely absorbed in the love and attention of you Maker.

That all sounds like pie in the sky until you read what Jesus said about the Kingdom of Heaven. He did not say "The kingdom of heaven is coming," nor did he say "It will be here shortly," nor did he indicate "It will only arrive after your death." I am told by Biblical scholars much better read on translation of the grammar than I that he said "The Kingdom of Heaven is come."

I believe that Jesus was inviting us to disregard the dominant value system of this world and to live, like Him, a declaration that it is God's values and mind that matters. We are invited to live courageously and unafraid because of what he did for us. We are given permission to live 'as if':

• as if the criticism of others does not wound


• as if the Kingdom of God were already fully realized


• as if encouragement is stronger than derision and kindness more important than cruelty


• as if investment in development of self and others is more important than looking good or avoiding appearing foolish
  

I am not sure that I have the courage to live that way - but don't want to turn down such an awesome invitation. The best I can do is ask God to help to me to move in that direction.