The Greatest Generation

I was listening to NPR the other morning and they were interviewing Tom Brokaw about his new book Boom. He was on the air pimping his new book, but also telling stories about his career and the many crazy things he has reported on over the years. Naturally, talk turned to his book The Greatest Generation. Call me a Gen X whiner, but the nickname that Brokaw coined for the folks that lived as young adults through World War II irritates me to no end. I am in no way trying to diminish the sacrifices made by those who pulled us through those challenging years! But this title does leave me with a feeling of defeat - kind of a "why bother" attitude that my generation is famous for.

I've never read this book, so I am not sure of the context of the moniker's creation. It just seems so absolute, and since it is quoted so often, it caught on pretty fast. I wonder if Brokaw realizes how far-reaching the sobriquet would be when he created it. It certainly has colored my view of my own generation and others - and not for the better. Perhaps that is the bane of my generation.

The Golden Compass

I got one of those emails recently warning of this awful movie coming out that will damage me and my children permanently and seriously!!
The Golden Compass is a children's fantasy novel by an atheist and the characters kill god at the end. I looked it up on imdb.com, and no mention of killing god whatsoever. Hmmmm.

So I head into my 5th grade son's parent-teacher conference with his homeroom teacher who is also the reading teacher and a very liberal Southern Baptist. She laughed when I asked about the book and told her about the frantic email warning. She loaned me the book from the 5th grade library, and then emailed me the next week to share that she had just received her first email warning about the evils of fantasy literature, which apparently some people cannot identify correctly.

Having just finished The Position by Meg Wolitzer (a great read about a family whose parents wrote a groundbreaking book about sex), I am ready for another fiction read. My non-fiction task is currently a book recommended by Phil Lund - The Handbook of Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence. This one will take a while for me to plow through.

check out for yourself the imdb info on the movie:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0385752/

The content of the email (from my fundamentalist sister-in-law) and the snopes comments are at:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/religion/compass.asp

Heaven forbid we teach people to discern fact from fiction and make decisions for themselves. SIGH

Pushmepullyou

I was having a talk at an event this last weekend with a friend who is also a member of the group that hosted the event. We limit attendance to 400 people. We feed them at this event and provide several live bands... this is a big event that requires TONS of coordination - all from volunteers who care about this event that we have now hosted for 12 years.

Our conversation had to do with him not knowing what was going on with meals, and my response was "well... I put it on the forum days ago that I was making food for Friday night for everyone," and his response was "I don't use that. I like my information pushed to me, not where I have to go pull it." I am the exact opposite.... I cannot stand getting tons of emails that have little to do with me. I want the info somewhere that I can easily get to to find it when I need it, and not sort through a barrage of stuff that clogs my mailboxes with everyone "replying to all" when really not all need to know their response, etc. I am a user of forums/discussion boards and not a lover of list serves or yahoo group-type arrangements for information sharing. I am about maxed out on all of it though.

I manage a portion of a website, have 3 email address accounts to deal with, numerous websites that I constantly glean info from for work, multiple discussion boards and blogs that I haunt, various newsletters that are "pushed" at me via email, a new forum I am trying to get up and running for PSD, and now I need to manage a facebook and/or myspace page for PSD work as well - probably both brands and probably more than one of each for different populations. And I am not even keeping up with all of the many forms that are being used currently and I don't use lots of these very well either. I am suffering from information overload ... too much coming at me and too much that I am trying to disperse. And good old analog technology... I have at least three phone meetings every month, and three committee meetings to attend in person.

And this is the kind of thing we are asking of our volunteers as well. How much of a spiritual home are we providing when we are practically deluging them, and our staff, with so much? It has almost gotten to where Sunday mornings are the slow portion of my work where I just have people wanting my attention in person, not in every form of technology I can think of as well.

Send in the Clowns

This is one of the best ways I have seen to deal with these hate-spreading freaks. Anybody up for getting some big red shoes and following Fred Phelps around? I could pretty easily be convinced to bring some pleasant silliness to his nightmarish protests and help make him the laughingstock that he is.

http://asheville.indymedia.org/article/107Clowns

Just click above to read about peaceful protest with a new style.

Play with your food!

Here is the Swamp Monster of Council Grove Reservoir that we discovered at the southern PSD camp planning weekend in July. I grew up going to this camp with UUC churches, and the site is very dear to my heart. Sadly, it is just not big enough for the rockin camp that we are planning for Summer of 2009. Be there!

Benevolent Neighbors to the North, eh

That is what I always call Canadians, and I recently had the chance to spend some time up North and enjoy a break from the 105+ heat of Kansas and send text messages home whining about the cold at night. No one had any sympathy for me dealing with the downright chilly weather near Honeywood, Ontario while they were having people die from the heat, but I was camping (insert whiney tone). I went up north to Unicamp, owned by the Canadian UU Council, for Concentric, the annual business meeting of C*UUYAN. What is C*UUYAN you are asking? Well, it is a practically unheard of organization of 18 to 35 year-old UU's rather like YRUU is for youth. Concentric is the annual business meeting at which the steering committee for C*UUYAN and the people who run the conferences are elected. The letters stand for Continental Unitarian Universalist Young Adult Network and I have no idea why there is an asterisk in there.

Elections were short this year since before they happened the current steering committee decided to re-assess its vision and goals and canceled Concentric and its partner conference for YA's - OPUS. OPUS (yes, always in all caps) is the spiritual retreat for YA's and C*UUYAN serves the entire continent as does YRUU. What has become painfully obvious to most people witnessing the progressively deteriorating network is that C*UUYAN has outlived its purpose. Let me explain... C*UUYAN members (any young adult is by default a member; no joining is necessary) claim that the purpose of their organization is to serve young adult UU's who do not find a spiritual home within a brick and mortar congregation. I argue that CYF (Church of the Younger Fellowship) now provides a spiritual home for that population and having existed less than two years is already doing a better job of it that C*UUYAN can. Please don't think of this as an attack on the individuals who love and support C*UUYAN and its events. They are amazing people who drive themselves too hard to try to work within a broken system. I am not sure that restructuring the system will do much good; I just don't think that C*UUYAN needs to exist any longer.

I described it as a very loyal dog who is sick and old and someone keeps shoving food and medicine down its throat while ignoring the healthy dogs and puppies that are hungry nearby. It is hard to put your loyal friend out of its misery, but you owe it to the friend.

The evolution of baseball and heirloom tomatoes

I have been rolling this around in my head for awhile, and the moment has finally come to put it on the screen. Baseball is like tomatoes. Barry Bonds just broke a record and the sports analysts are having a field day arguing about whether or not it "counts." Well, of course it counts, he hit more home runs than Hank Aaron... that is a new record. It counts, but it just doesn't mean the same thing anymore. It is not comparing apples to oranges, but more like comparing heirloom tomatoes to grocery store tomatoes.

Heirloom tomatoes do no travel well. They weren't designed to travel. They were designed to be eaten still warm from the sun, just picked, and delicious alone or maybe a pinch of salt and pepper. Grocery store tomatoes were designed to be placed into trucks and driven halfway across the country or further and get to their destination without being squashed. It doesn't matter that they are pink, bland, and pithy. They are not about flavor, they are about distance.

And ever since the baseball strike, baseball has been more about distance (metaphorically) and less about flavor (more metaphor). It is not the same game that it used to be, and I propose that Unitarian Universalism does not much resemble Unitarianism or Universalism as they were originally developed. I am not saying that this is a bad thing. Grocery store tomatoes serve their purpose, after all. Our Unitarian Universalist tradition is a Living Tradition, growing and evolving, serving different needs for different people. Some people would rather go to Hy Vee and pick up some hothouse toms or hydroponically grown ones, and that is fine. Me? I'd rather pick them from my own vines and sit on my porch slurping them up after wiping the dirt off onto my jeans. It's a religious experience.