I Used to Be Smart.

(This has nothing to do with a Portugese explorer.  It’s just something I wrote today.)

There is a certain blue that cannot be described.  It is not that it hasn’t yet been describe.  It cannot be described.  No matter how many poets and how many metaphors, it will never capitulate to mere words on a page, or spoken from any mouth.

The perfect blue of a spring sky speaks for itself, and when you listen to what says, your pen will write volumes.

At times I have thought that life was made of the grandiose — like the big words that I use when I write.  Today, I hear that I am wrong.  Life is what happens in all of the small moments.  Life is not explosions.  It is the slow burning of a long fuse.  it may occasionally be grand, but what it is cannot be found in the grandiose.

Who we are is not shown in the drama and the explosions.  Who we are is made clear in the stillness of the everyday.  Character is revealed in secret and quiet, not on billboards or magazine covers.  Passion in revealed in the hidden actions, not in pomp or bombast.

Even God waited for the whisper after the storm to say, “I am here.”  And that makes us all fools.  We are all woefully short.  We are all jerking our heads around explosion to explosion until the noise has made us deaf and the flash has made us blind, until we cannot see the blue in the sky because of all the smoke that we have made.

And it is only grace by which God can sweep in hand in to fan away the smake and stench and keep whispering, “I am here,” into our lives.  Until, in our deafness, we remember how to listen for silence, and, in our blindness, we begin to see past the nose on our face.  Until, before long, we become poets again, looking for the metaphors for this new blue that we’ve just discovered.

(I can’t leave well enough alone.  I have to do the immigration thing.)

Before I enter this mess, allow me to make one thing completely clear.  I am a Christian.  Before I am loyal to any nation state, I am loyal to Christ.

That is where everything begins.  What I believe about immigration is not a function of what policy I feel will be best for America.  What I believe about immigration is, as best I can see it, the outworking of God would have to me live in the world, and the desire to join with God in all of the ways that God is already at work in the world.  I would not have it any differently.

Seeing the world in this way, one thing is true: no person should ever be viewed as a function of where they were born.  No person is more or less deserving of anything because of something over which they had absolutely no choice.  No person has any more right to anything simply because of aribtrary boundary definitions that were ill-gotten from the beginning.

I believe that is how Jesus would have us to see the world, a planet made of people — people not defined by where they were born.

That being said, I can say this controversial sentence that will probably land me on some government watchlist.  (And if you are watching, I’m a pacifist, I promise.)  I find no real reason to be conerned with American self-preservation.  I see no mandate to hold preference over any person, policy, or institution simply because it originates from the country in which I happened to be born.  Furthermoer, I see no reason to withhold anything from any person simply because of where they were born.  If those men who wrote the Constitution were correct, and there are certain things in the world that are inalienable, then those things are inalieable to every single person in the world.

There as some things — love, justice, peace, sustenance — that ensure that people can live as God intended them to live.  I believe that it is our duty to do our best to provide those things to any person that we may have the great joy of encountering, regardless of whether or not the possess the proper documentation.  We should never hesistate because of a worry about the preservation of America.  That is not our job.  Our job is not to preserve any way of life.  Our job to live as if the kingdom of God is at hand.  Our job is to live as God would have us to live, regardless of how it may affect the things that we hold dear and the institution that we cherish the most.  We must live as God would have us to live, in spite of consequences that appear disastrous to what is comfortable, trusting that if we are living as well as we can in line with the kingdom of God that whatever God is working through us will be better than whatever we have left behind.

The concept of nationhood is nothing new.  God endowed God’s people with that concept from the very beginning.  It was, however, an endowment that came with an expectation.  They were endowed with the concept of nationhood so that they may be a blessing to all of the other nations.  Israel was a nation whose goal was to transform the nations around it.  This transformation would not occur by the means of its own rigid self-preservation.  The transformation would occur by hearing and obeying the words of God.  They were to welcome the orphan and the widow.  They were to work and to rest.  They were to watch out carefully for the others in the nation, and they were to become something that would be a blessing to the nations — all of the nations.  Israel was never a blessing as a means of self-preservation, or even as a corollary of self-preservation.  Israel was merely to be a blessing at whatever cost, trusting the way that God told them to live was the best way, trusting that their citizenship in the work of God was the most important thing in the world.

We must reclaim our citizenship in the kingdom of God.  Our priorities must shift.  We must forgo the ideas of national self-preservation and attempt to become a blessing to all nations.  We must realign our thoughts so that our primary allegiance is to no nation-state, but is simply to the kingdom of God.  We must recognize the importance of every person, regardless of the places that they were born and the languages that they speak.  We must be willing to shed our notions of propriety and comfort for the sake of a world to which we are called to be salt and light.  We must be willing to lose everything that is most important to us, and trust that living life in the way that God has commanded will have the better result.  Though it may be painful and even catastrophic, we must be committed to being the people that God has called us to be.

We must be citizens of the kingdom of God.  We must belong to a global kingdom that knows no borders, that excludes no tribe or tongue.  Our allegiance must be to this kingdom alone, not arbitrary earthly kingdom and the arbitrary lines of their bloody borders.  We must pursue the things of God no matter what they might cost us.

It’s wild, I know.  But don’t write it off just yet…

There are some nights that going to bed feels like admitting defeat.  It means admitting that nothing has changed today, and when I wake up tomorrow, things will be exactly like they were yesterday.  I am not any closer to anything.  One day just blurs into the next, and time keeps trickling by.  There is no change at all.  Everything just stays as it has always been.

What is so hard about words is that there are so few. No matter how many we learn, or no matter how hard we try to put them together in ways that are totally unique, someone has done it already. Someone has already said what we are trying to say, and they have probably said it better. I used to think the solution was to make the words larger, harder to understand. That display of intelligence, I believed, would make me original. Imagine my surprise when that proved to be a decision from naivite and a source of alienation. What I have been discovering is that the best expression is not the product of ever-expanding words or undiscovered convetions. Rather, the best expression happens when we are most honest, and when we try to say whatever it is we need to say with the only words that can actually say it. That is why Bob Dylan is he who is — no other words can say those things. It is not that Dylan is smarter than the rest of us, he’s just discovered how to say what’s on his mind, and he’s discovered an honesty that allows him to say it well.

I’ve never found myself to be much of a storyteller. I always feel like my stories are just strung together recitations of events that have happened in sequence. I would be better off making a bulleted list than organizing all of those thoughts in paragraphs. Because of that, I have trouble telling stories that way. I have trouble outlining all of the whos and the whens and how everyone got from point A to point B. Events do not stick in my head that way.

So, it’s not easy to tell any story. Every story feels heavy, especially if I know that it will be read (and maybe I’m just flattering myself by thinking it will be read). However, part of art is being honest. The best art is the art that hurts, the art that scares me. (Of course I don’t mean in the “scary movies” way.) It’s the art that is terrifying to submit for public consumption. There is a chance that a real part of me, something that I find important and honest could be the source of scorn — or, worse yet, apathy. What is most important to me could be completely disregarded, and left to gather dust. It could be read, and simply passed over, eliciting no response for reader, devoid of the power to be honest, to be True, or to be important. That is difficult. That makes it easier to remain guarded in my writing, and to write about things can stand the test of apathy without much personal pain.

None of that is why I started writing this. I started writing this to tell a story, but the story feels heavy, like saying all of this needs to be said. The problem is that I didn’t make up any of the characters, and that they call can (easily) access the story if I am bold enough to share it, and that is a big responsibility. I’m scared about all the ways that I will qualify myself as to not be misunderstood, and I start to wonder if I’m being honest at all. So my only promise is this: I will be as honest as I can to the story as best I felt it. (Yes, the word choice in that sentence IS important.) And I will use the best words I can find to attempt to express that honesty. If you’re a character in this story, and being a character in this story is a problem for you, then I am genuinely sorry. I’m trying to be as honest as possible, even where it hurts. And the chances are that if you’re in this particular story, that you have my phone number. You can let me know if that was that unfair.

Now, the problem with a buildup like that is that the rest of the entry will probably be entirely disappointing. You can call me about that too.

—–

Some nights are perfect, and you never figure out why. It’s not that any amazing happened. Ed McMahon never showed up at anyone’s house with a check for some number that I can’t even fathom. Nobody held a ticket with that wildly improbably combination of random lottery numbers. It wasn’t even that everything went perfectly. There was more than one mistake. It wasn’t even that the night was much different than any other night that had come before it. It was the same people, and we were doing the same things that we always do. There was just something that happened, some combination of events, some feeling that made everything perfect. Maybe it was just the weather. Maybe it was just the beer. Maybe it was some weird combination of the two. Whatever it was, nothing was enough to make the night less than perfect.
—–

There are only a few things that can make me forget about tomorrow. One is Bruce Springsteen and the windows down, the other is a cold beer and a front porch. There was a magic in that late afternoon. I sat with my legs dangling from the edge of the porch, and we all looked out over the hills of northern Scott County. We all sat, watching a storm roll past, in disbelief at the light show that accompanied the churning clouds. If it had not have felt so perfect, it would have at least looked that way.

It was a rare moment when there were no attempts made to ascribe any purpose that was not already there. On that porch, everything was just exactly as it was. As I write, I invest all sorts of energy into making everything mean more than it really did. Sitting on the porch, everything could just be as it was. We could just be people who cared about each other. We could be people who hurt each other sometimes, people who had made mistakes before and people who will make mistakes again. We could just sit there, not saying much more than what needed to be said and stare out over the hills, letting everything be exactly as it was.  Although there were millions of things running through each of our minds, I’m sure, something about that sitting there made everything okay.  We were nothing more than who we were.
—–

It is remarkable how we give other people power over us.  I sometimes think that is just me, but I find that it is a human problem.  We give other people the power to affect us deeply, then we lie to ourselves about the power that they have over us.  We pretend that everything can be as it was, when we know that nothing can be as it was.  We tell ourselves that we’re in control enough to deal with situations that will get the best of us every time.  Those things are hard.  It’s nobody’s fault.  It’s so easy to assign blame, and that assignment makes us feel like we’re vindicated — but it’s not true.  Blame is inappropriate.  And it would be easier sometimes just to find some reason to write those relationships off, but you know better.  So you try hard, but you wreck yourself again over the same things.  But you can tell that it’s getting a little easier, and that it doesn’t matter as much as it did, and that part of it is just the beer.  You may not be as far along as you want to be, but you’re doing what you can.

And the lightning in the distance and the big dog beside certainly don’t hurt matters a bit.

—–

At some arbitrary point in history, people decided that women should be the gender responsible for preparing food for other people. Whoever decided that obviously never prepared food for anyone else. I like to think that my masculinity is in a position of fairly unquestionable security, and there are few things that I love more than cooking for other people.

In fact, I think that whatever idiot did decide that something like cooking should be segregated by something as arbitrary as gender roles is, in fact, just that — an idiot.

Perhaps it was just simple validation. Perhaps it was just me wanting to be able to brag about something. However, you when see other people enjoying — really enjoying — something that you participated in making (and it was a group effort), there is a real joy in that. It’s a puffed up sort of “look at me” feeling. It is something deeper, something different. It is a knowledge that something good is happening in the sharing of this meal. You feel privileged to have been able to help prepare it.

Maybe it lies in the realization that these people are important to you — all of them — and that if you can do something that the people who are important to you can genuinely enjoy — if you can give them that sort of gift, then you have done something good and important with your time and skill.

There is a deep validation in the ability to be useful. There is an especially deep validation in the ability to be useful to those people who are important to us. It affirms who we are. It affirms that what we have is a real relationship, not a drain on someone else’s resources. It shows us the importance of who we are. It lets us know that our presence means something. Perhaps some people have reached a level of confidence where all of those things would be unnecessary and unimportant, but I’ve yet to arrive at a place where validation and affirmation are not important in my life.

—–

When a bomb goes off in a crowded room, there are not always warning signs. A large, red, digital clock does not always count down to zero while a sweating (and often unwitting) hero agonizes over which wire cut will avert the impending crisis. Sometimes, there is no means of anticipation. There is just a noise, an explosion, and chaos.

Sometimes, nobody sees all the ingredient being mixed together — too many beers, an idescribable comfort level, an unprecendented level of intelligence, strong personalities, diverse perspectives and personalities — if they all swirl enough, with just enough prodding, just enough buttons pushed, they will invariably explode.

The exploding is certainly something. It’s not that it’s a bad thing. It’s not that anyone was close enough to the bomb to get hurt. Everyone was a safe distance away. It was just so much noise and so much, and it all happened so quickly — from relative calm to utter chaos in a few seconds. Chances are that nobody learned anything. It was just theatrics. We all marvelled as everything blew up.

However, the novelty of the explosion quickly wore off, and found itself to be no match for what followed. The silence that followed the chaos was far more spectacular than the chaos itself. Very few things match the quite of a night in the country. Very few things are as good as lying on a porch, trying hard to find a pattern in the randomness above you, and being honest about things that you don’t often get the chance to be honest about with someone that you don’t talk to nearly as much as you should.

When the night has been a rollercoaster of food-induced joy and beer induced frustration, there is a calmness that a front porch brings. There is a sanity to even the smallest bit of soul baring that cannot be duplicated anywhere else. There is a way of realizing that the world is a good place, and that these people are good people, and all of the things that you always thought you had to be afraid of don’t really matter all that much anyway.

You know that nothing has really changed, you just know that you’ve laughed so much that you didn’t have time to think about all of the things that you usually worry about, and you know that you were honest to the point that you don’t have to worry about acceptance or rejection anymore.

And even when you’re making the same mistakes that you’ve been making for years, certain nights give you a clarity that let you know that you’re making progress — that we’re all making progress — and that it’s a damn good thing that we all found each other, because who knows where we would without us.

—–

Okay. So that’s that. It was a lot of buildup for nothing, I’m sure, and I turned out to be a lot less specific than I thought it would be. For better or for worse, I just tried to write it with my voice, all of my nueroses included. It’s not really a story, I know, and it’s probably not even worth reading — and that’s okay with me. I just wanted to be honest. I’ve agonized over this thing for almost a week, and I don’t know why, but there it is. It’s yours now.

I must echo DH’s proclomation.

Summer is here.

Maybe the sun isn’t at just the right position for the weatherman to call it summer, but that’s okay with me. I feel it. I could feel it tonight. I took the back way home. I could feel with my windows rolled down. I could tell by the smell that was in the air. I could see it in the way that the sun laid its long shadows over the farms. I could hear it in the songs that were playing on the stereo.

There was just that perfect moment that is beyond all describing when it became clear that it had become summer. Everything had changed. It was time to throw off winter and all of the damp cold and step into something new, something full of all sorts of potential. It was time to put everything that the winter had been behind me, and move into the potentiality and all of the grace that it holds.

It’s time to sit outside with good friends, drinking (too many) good beers, laughing too loud, and dream big dreams. It’s time for every fish on the end of line to the biggest fish yet. It’s time to find grace both in everything expected that will happen and everything unexpected that will happen. It’s time for “Jimmy Eat World and those nights in my car.”

There something about summer. There something about the warmth and the sun and the smells and all of the potential that make me think, “I was made for this. Something good and loving made me for all of this.” I can’t help but feel it. In the same places that get moved by Bruce Springsteen and Death Cab for Cutie I know it’s true. God is incredibly good, and God made me for this world, to enjoy every second of it. God made me to grab summer and shake loose every bit of potential from it. God made me to be overly sentimental about the effects of changing seasons and about pop songs. It’s nothing that I can help, it’s just the way that I’m wired.

So, to quote a wise man named Andrew McMahon, “Oh the trouble we can get in, so let’s screw this one up right…”

And, just maybe, we’ll all figure out who we really are before winter clamps down on us again.

There’s a mini-scuffle going on in Kentucky education right now.  The state school board is attempting to rework curriculum in schools so that time designations will be tought as BCE and CE instead of BC and AD.  There difference is between “Before Common Era” and “Common Era” versus “Before Christ” and “Anno Domini” (In the year of the Lord).  It’s been happening in history for quite a long time now.  Everywhere else, it’s standard notation.

However, conservative Christians are quite up in arms about the whole thing.  I find that odd.  So, to those people, I defer to someone who said it much better than I can:

I hate, I despise your feasts,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them;
and the peace offerings of your fattened animals,
I will not look upon them.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
to the melody of your harps I will not listen.
But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

–Amos 5:21-24

Today, I bought and listened to Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys.  That makes me really weird, because none of my friends own or have any desire to own Pet Sounds, and I doubt that if anyone is reading this that they have any interest in owning Pet Sounds.

However, I will confess that I did have one of those rare moments, during the middle of “Sloop John B” where I realized that I was listening to something great, and that because great art exists, that things in this world might just be okay.  I can’t explain why.  It was just a perfectly timed instrumental break, and a harmony that fell just right.  It was probably just some chemicals in my brain reacting to some weird interaction of frequencies — but I like to think that moments like that are something more.

I know that makes me weird, but I’m okay with that.

This was intended to be the third post yesterday, but, not surprising, the ambition and the output were not a match.

I read this in a book by Frederick Buechner:  “Lust is the craving for salt of a person who is dying of thirst.”

I was immediately levelled, and I had to re-read the sentence multiple times.  I’ve been thinking about it ever since.  Buechner, I have always known, is a smart man and a very good writer, but his insight here is amazing.

We lust after all kinds of things.  It’s not just that we leer at the opposite sex as the walk down the street, plotting ways to fulfill all of our sexual urges with them.  That is one way we lust, but is not the only way we lust.  We lust after all sorts of things.  I lust after all sorts of things.  I lust after certain actual, material “things.”  I lust after certain vision of success and wealth.  I lust after the ability to be percieved by people a certain way.  There are, I am sure, a million more things that I lust over every day.

However, if Buechner is right, even if I can get what it is that I think I want, it will only have the effect of destroying me even further.  It is not even some sort of stop-gap.  It is not neutral of arbitrary.  Getting the things for which we lust is actually destroying us.  That is a sobering thought.  If it is true, we must not content with occasionally giving in to our lusts, but we must run away from them, fully aware of their ability to destroy.

Furthermore, if all of this is true, then our lusts must have a certain revelatory capacity.  What we are lusting after must somehow reveal to us what we actually need.  If we can find a way to be brutally honest with ourselves about the things that we are lusting after, it stands to reason that we can find out WHY those lusts exists.  There must be some component thing that will serve to give us life rather than destroy us.  That is a lot of introspection and hard work.  That’s a lot of painful honesty with the self, and that may even take the help of some other people who struggle with the same things.  It’s not work that we’re ever going to WANT to do, but if Buechner is right, it’s the only way to stop killing ourselves and to start recovering.

So last night, I was up entirely too late, watching God only knows what on tv.  The most hideous commercial came on.  It was for some very odd motorized device on which various bath products could be attached, and those attachments were meant to somehow either expedite or enrich the clearning the process.  However, both the quickened and the thorough cleanings were not the only benefit.  The product also offered to be a hideously mechanized fountain of youth.  In an event that I can only compare to the use of a belt sander, a lady “exfoliated” herself and was able to achieve “microdermabrasion.”  I took Latin.  I know what that means.  It means “a bunch of little cuts on your skin.”  Very nice.

It was awfully late, so maybe I just dreamed the whole (and I really hope that’s the case).  However, I realized the genius of the marketing campaign and the cult of youth that mass marketing has created.

The best marketing is the marketing that makes us feel that our lives are not complete unless we buy their product — whether it’s a pasta pot or a belt sander approved for bathroom use.  With the appeal to youth, marketing directors everywhere have found something that is genius.

We can never get younger.  By convincing us that younger is better, advertisers have found a way to have their way with us.  If we buy the lie that it is shameful to age, then we will constantly thrash about, attempting to recapture a youth that can never be recaptured.

Why should we let them win?

I have this crazy idea.  I think we should age gracefully.  I think we should accept the maturity that age brings.  I think we should respect the wisdom that age naturally gives.  I think we should undue the lie that is shameful for women to tell their age, as if how old they are is some sort of cause for disgrace.  We all grow old.  We cannot help it.  And, truly, it should not BE helped.  It is the only way to live life — to continually grow with all of the new experiences we have, to pass the time by means of more and more stories to tell, and to pass it in more and more places to see.

The passing of the time is never the problem.  The problem is only in what we have done with the time that has passed.

If my production matches my ambition today, this is going to be the first of three blog entries today.  While that’s not unprecedented, I think that you should be really proud of me and my capacity to dream up all of these silly ideas that I think are worth writing about.  (Although, to be honest, they’re probably not worth reading about.  So I’m sorry for putting you through this.)

My brother let me in on a little secret a few months ago.  It’s a band called Limbeck.  As of right now, I am convinced that they are a great band.  Their sound isn’t anything revolutionary or out of the ordinary.  They’re pretty standard fare alt-country.  If you don’t know what alt-country is, don’t be scared by my intimidating use of a hipster label.  It just makes me look cool, and it lets me act like I know what I’m talking about.  I don’t.

It’s nothing weird or experimental.  There’s no dissonant chords over dissonant chords or long meandering guitar solos that don’t make sense to anyone.  It wasn’t all recorded on a computer somewhere without any real instruments.  It’s just some guys who make rock and roll with a little twang.  They travel around in a van, they play shows, and they write songs.

As far as I’m concerned, that’s the American dream.

The thing about Limbeck is this: they’re inspiring.  They sing songs about travelling around the country and meeting all sorts of people.  They sing about hanging out on porches and about the things they see out the windows of the van.  They write music about writing music, and they sing songs about sing singing songs, and although I’ve never seen them, their songs make it obvious that they love it.

And I have to be honest — I love it too.  Limbeck (like Don Miller) makes me want to sell my car and buy a van.  They make me want to find some friends and an open road.  They make me want to talk to strangers and hear all of their interesting stories.  They make me want to sit on porches until entirely too late with a good beer and no worries about what’s going to happen tomorrow.  They make me want to find a freedom that the same house and a part-time job can’t ever offer me.

“What we’ve got now is three quarters of a twenty dollar bill, a whole lot of time to kill, and a long way to go….”

I figured something out about music today.

I had my iPod on shuffle, and I was flipping through songs, unable to find anything that I really wanted to listen to. I noticed that I was passing up REALLY good songs, and even some GREAT songs. It was at that moment that I figured something out.

There is an unbelievable amount of great music in the world. Even on my iPod, there is so much great music that I can’t devote the time I should to all of it. I get so Springsteen fixated that I forget about Dylan, or I get so enamored with Woody Guthrie that I forget about Elvis Costello. There just isn’t enough time for me to devote to all of the really great songs that should be listened to. It’s just not possible.

So I can’t waste the time I do have. Why should I spend my time listening to songs that are okay when there is so much out there that is unbelievable? Why should I concern myself with sufficient, passable art when there is art out there that is so great that I almost can’t stand it? Life is entirely too short to listen to music that doesn’t inspire in ways that I can’t even start to describe.

That’s the amazing power of music — the power to be true and to tell the truth in ways regular words cannot, while inspiring in ways that just cannot be described.  Music has the incredible power to be something incredibly transcendant and amazing.  So why should we waste our time on music that is just mediocre?  Why should we worry about songs that are just passable and catchy but ultimately vacuous?  It’s just not worth it.

We should live and die with the songs we listen to.  We should be inspired and depressed and infuriated by the things that are sung to us.  Music should be a channel for grace and truth and inspiration — not something that fills space with the noice of a recycled melody.

We should let the music have the power that that profits have tried so hard to steal from it.

We should listen with our whole hearts as much as with our ears.

This afternoon at the store, I bought some turkey.

In typical fasion, I began to think (too much, probably) about the turkey I had in my hand.  What kind of animal had it come from?  What sort of life had that animal lived?

I realized that I was probably eating something that had not had much of a life.  It had probably lived in a cage that was too small, in conditions that were not conducive to any sort of life.  There was no hint of anything remotely organic about the turkey, so it was probably pumped full of antibiotics.  Who knows what sorts of the things the turkey was fed?

I my guilt over the purchase of this turkey, my mind immediately played back the most common rejoinder to these types of concerns.  “So what?  It’s just a turkey.”  And for a minute, I thought I had to be satisfied with that response, because I thought that it must be just a turkey.

The more I thought about it, the more that argument began to lose any of the legs it may have had.  It’s not just a turkey.  The way we treat the animals that we eat is indicative of the way we view the world around us.  If we are content to be ignorant about the conditions in which our meat was raised, and if we wish to have no respect for the way animals are treated in these factories (because they’re not farms), then we are revealing our hand to everyone.  We show ourselves as people who have respect for the world in which we live.  We’re revealing that we do not realize that the resources that we take for granted must be well-managed to be sustained.  We show that do not realize that reckless consumption in the name of the bottom line is ultimately more destructive that any price hike that responsibility may incur.

We do not understand what we are doing.  We have no idea how our living affects the lives around us (both human and non-human).  We’re clueless people who let manipulative market forces rule our decision making.  We allow our work (and our lives) to be hijacked by people that only wish to profit from us.

Is it any wonder that the Fortune #1 company is Exxon-Mobil?