A Desperate Plea for Thanksgiving Day

As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.
- President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917–1963)


Good morning!  Good afternoon!  Good evening!  Whatever time it is for you when you read this, HAPPY THANKSGIVING!  One of the wisest men I've ever known, Dr. Paul Stewart, once said to myself and an assembled Sunday-school class that Thanksgiving is the best holiday, because of the "big four" holidays it is the least centered on getting some thing for oneself, and the most centered on giving gratitude and benevolence to others.

This seems, to me, somewhat undeniable.  There's no Easter basket expected, there's no Halloween candy, and we all know that we organize the schedule of things we want in late autumn conveniently around December 25th.

What's more, Thanksgiving is so simply and amazingly pleasant, at least in my experience thereof.  It most closely resembles what I think Christian feast days are really supposed to be: we come together amiably, we consume a prodigious amount of food, during which and after which everyone is essentially required to do their best to be on their best behavior toward everyone else.  Thanksgiving is the best holiday, and everyone deserves Thanksgiving.

Unfortunately, not everyone (even among those who do celebrate Thanksgiving) gets a Thanksgiving.

More unfortunately, you and I and the people we know and love have probably all contributed to this deplorable state of affairs, more or less directly.

Across the United States, on this most wonderful of holidays, there are probably millions of people at work.  Some of these people do genuinely need to be at work, because they're working jobs that cannot go unfilled: the police officers, the fire departments, emergency service workers, prison guards, and so on and so forth.  Some, unfortunately, do need to miss at least part of the day, for the good of our society.

But does the cashier at Walmart need to carve out 6 hours of work when she'd rather carve out 6 pieces of turkey and a relaxing evening with her family?

Do workers at Denny's, select McDonald's, Pizza Huts, Burger Kings and other restaurants need to serve their customers burgers when they could be serving their families another helping of mashed potatoes?

No.  No, a thousand times.

And this brief list doesn't even take into account workers who must go to sleep early to get up for Black Friday store openings at 6 A.M., or workers who must either sleep through a large portion of the day or forego their sleep in order to work a midnight opening so that you and I and our not-so-Great-Aunt Ethel can get $40 off select Apple products in-store-only between the hours of 2:16 A.M. and 8:47 A.M.

Of course though, we can all lament that people have to work on holidays, with varying degrees of fervor.  But what I would point out, what I have to say, is that if you are out shopping, or eating, or getting gas, if you are doing anything that necessitates the presence of an employee at any place of business anywhere, you are the problem.

Stores would not pay their workers to keep the store open if keeping those stores open did not provide profit for the business, and stores would not receive profit for opening the store on a holiday if people weren't shopping there on the holiday.

If we want everyone to have a full, unfettered Thanksgiving, if that is not too much to ask for the underpaid, underprivileged human beings that market capitalism turns into ground meat on our holidays, not too much to ask from the gigantic businesses that seek to separate you and I from our hard-earned money, then we must stop shopping on these holidays.

Be careful when you stock up on food for Thanksgiving, or Christmas, or Easter, write a list if you have to, take an inventory of your kitchen before you go shopping, but whatever you do, don't go shopping on the holiday.

Get the best deals you can, if you must, on stuff for yourself and your friends, but for the love of your fellow human beings and their families, don't do it at a 12 A.M. Black Friday doorbuster.  The store will be just as open tomorrow, or later in the day, and in all likelihood you can probably find a better deal on Amazon.

All I'm saying here is that by utilizing services and places of business on Thanksgiving, we become part of the problem; we create a social place where there is a need for work.  And if you love Thanksgiving like I love Thanksgiving, and if you want everyone to be able to enjoy it just the same, I hope and I pray that you will join me in staying home and enjoying a nice, calm day at home with friends, family, and food.

God bless, and happy Thanksgiving.

The Mackelmore Fallacy and the Elephant in the Room

"Whatever god you believe in
We come from the same one
Strip away the fear, underneath, it's all the same love"

There is a story, more of a parable really, that is quite frequently used in the modern world to describe what is quite possibly the most simultaneously well-intentioned, arrogant and diminutive generalized perspective on "religion".  The parable goes something like this:

There were, walking along the road, a number of kind, old, blind men.  As they traveled together they happened upon a large elephant and began describing the great beast to one another.  "It is long, slender, and flexible," said one man, gently petting the trunk.  "No, it is large, strong, and rough," replied another, holding onto the beast's leg.  "No," said yet another, as he lightly stroked the elephant's ear, "it is soft, and thin, and light; it moves freely like a butterfly."  Still another, grasping the tusks, chimes in, "You are all fools!  It is hard, smooth and very sharp!"

The idea in this amazingly didactic parable is that religion is a single, general, complex and multifaceted entity, and because of this, individual religions and religious perspectives are not so much expressions of truth as they are useful pieces of truth.

This is, I think a major problem in modern (generally secular) religious thought that I believe is fully present in Mackelmore's song Same Love, and although I'm willing to admit I may be reading a perspective I hate into a song over which I feel cautious, doing so because of the perspective's prevalence in the city of Seattle from whence the song comes, I think that within the full context of the song the lines quoted above provide evidence of the perspective.

And, if this perspective is not present in this song, it is quite certainly as virulent as a plague in America and it's still worth talking about.

Just in case you haven't heard the elephant parable before, you may recognize the same perspective as typified in remarks like, "All religions lead to the same place eventually," or "I'd say I'm spiritual, but I try not to isolate myself to one particular tradition."  I don't want to demonize this perspective, but I would like to point out some of its key flaws

1.  The Elephant

The first big elephant in the room with the parable of the blind men and the elephant is, well, the elephant.

The problem is that the moment you typify or symbolize a broad-painted (and thoroughly western) conception of "religion in general" as one entity, you have begun from the individual perspective that there is such a thing as "religion in general" and that, furthermore, all religions are expressing in different ways the same essential essence.

This is a notion that is very easy to romanticize, but it is far too simplistic.

Muslims conceive of God as completely transcendent of humanity, and believe that his goodness lies in his arbitrary decision to make us, to sustain us, and to love us, absent any notion of compulsion and definitively not in any way identified with or existing in any plane of existence we can understand

Christians conceive of the same God as three entities in one entity, a doctrine called absurd by critics that at least one believer has called "so absurd that it must be true."  We believe that the infinite being in whom Muslims and Jews place their faith made himself finite and, what's more, definite in a single person and then assumed that definite (read: human) nature into his own infinite nature.  So the infinite becomes finite and makes the finite infinite while being at once one single being who is three infinite beings who can be defined as not the same thing as one another.

Meanwhile, those who fall under the great variety of traditions and schools normally labeled Hinduism believe that all substances, both visible and invisible, are ultimately one substance, which they call Brahman.  So all finite things are ultimately a part of the infinite reality of all existence, while still remaining definite from one another: after all, within the Hindu conception it is crucial that "atman is brahman", the individual soul is also the world soul...

But this is made explicitly distinct from Buddhist teachings (at least within the Theravada school) that the self does not ultimately exist.  Actually, when you get down to the core of it, Theravada Buddhism insists that what we call existence is only an illusion and that the ultimate reality of all things is that there is no ultimate reality of anything; or, for that matter, any reality of anything, ever.

At the modern edge of all of this, Scientific Atheists like Richard Dawkins tend to insist that the physical universe as we observe it is ultimate reality, and that furthermore that reality is, by the very principles that govern it, multiplied across dimensions into every conceivable possibility that has ever been, well, possible.  There is, understandably, no God in atheism, but there is a radical, beautiful, and sublime cosmology of possibility and instance that firmly deserves consideration within the spectrum of the religious systems it denies

At the very least, can we please acknowledge that the perspective which says that all of these incredibly different perspectives are the same thing is DEFINITELY in and of itself a completely separate perspective?

Furthermore, the "blind men and the elephant" perspective assumes that where the greatest religious and atheist minds of human history have tried their hardest to understand the ultimate meaning (or absence thereof) of all things and come up quite genuinely disagreeing with one another, modern, casual, impious speculation has found the real answer and can see that in the end there is, in fact, an elephant for the blind men to see.

2.  The Blind Men

I don't have much to say on this point, except that the perspective and the metaphor that best exemplifies it is just fundamentally offensive.

"No," says the modern spiritual person to the religious person, "you don't really know what it is that you're talking about.  It's all fine and well that you've spent your life in prayer and contemplation, that you've gone to worship services and dedicated your fear and trembling to the questions of your existence.  As a matter of fact, good for you, so very good for you that what you're doing makes you happy, but really you're like a blind man grasping at a thing that only a lack of commitment can help you understand.

Jesus?  Saladin?  Ashoka?  The Buddha?  All of them were blind men, and even though they disagreed (probably because they were silly enough to endorse individual perspectives) they were really looking at the same thing and apparently just didn't realize it.

Sorry, but this whole model is diminutive.  I am a Christian, others are Muslims, others are Vaishnavites, others Buddhists and others fall under innumerable other categories I cannot list here.  We can all respect one another, hell, we can all believe that maybe we'll all be more or less on good terms, whoever ends up being right.

But we do not have to resort to saying that everyone is wrong and everyone is right to do that.  We can believe, actually believe something that is fundamentally different from something that someone else believes and we can still have respect for one another when we do that.

The Macklemore Fallacy and the Importance of Orthodoxy

"God loves all his children is somehow forgotten, but we paraphrase a book written 3500 years ago."

So rings one of the most poignant lines in Mackelmore's hit song "Same Love" off of his collaborative album with Ryan Lewis.  The song, if you haven't heard it, is on the whole a much-needed and very welcome hip-hop endorsement of legal rights and social acceptance of those persons who fall within the LGBTQ spectrum, and it's profundity is perhaps only matched by the amount of musical talent and insight poured into it.  Being a piece by Mackelmore, it's primary narrative impetus comes through rapped verses, although a hauntingly beautiful chorus which echoes the essential cry of the persons with whom the song is concerned is provided by Mary Lambert.  What's more, the song as a musical piece is given a kind of musical grandiosity and a decidedly religious bend by both several lines, one of which is quoted above, which make direct reference to God and/or religion in general, and in case the religious point of the song was not driven home thoroughly enough by Mackelmore and Ms. Lambert, the song fades away to the attributes of love as listed in 1st Corinthians chapter 13.

This is a good song, a well-needed catchy and universal cry for LGBTQ rights, and it deserves almost every bit of praise that can be given up to it.

Nonetheless, there are two specific problems I find with the song's stance on religion.  Both of these problems, while well exemplified here, are far from rare and deserve, because of their befuddling and pervasive presence in 21st century life, special consideration

The first of these is the line quoted at the start of this article, a statement which seems agreeable and tempting at first, the faults of which are evident upon even the lightest inspection.

There is, of course, the somewhat obvious (though nonetheless significant) issue that the Bible, the obvious target of the remark, is not a single book, and while most of the Bible is likely drawn from a strict oral tradition reaching back maybe 3500 or so years ago (although that does set things back quite a ways), even the book of Leviticus, the earliest explicit condemnation of homosexuality in the Biblical text, was likely actually written down closer to the 6th or 7th century B.C.  It is, of course, easy to dismiss the difference between 2500 years ago and 3500 years ago, but let us be clear that we're talking a difference of 40%, but one thousand years.  If we assume a very generous average lifespan of 40 years, this comes out to twenty-five generations of people, and although the world didn't change terribly much by modern standards in that thousand years, it did significantly change and, more fundamentally, 3500 years and 2500 years are quite simply not the same thing, so the comment is first and foremost careless in its misuse of dating.  This is not likely done for intentional reasons to cloud the judgement of persons listening to the song, but it is incredibly ignorant, an extreme exaggeration, or some amalgamation of the two.

Still, this dodges the real implied meaning of the line.

The obvious point in saying that "we paraphrase a book written 3500 years ago" is that we, in this context "we" being those who do not endorse LGBTQ rights, have not only made a general human error, but have done so by misinterpretation of an old text with which we have allowed ourselves to become out of touch.

I want to be clear here, I really do love Mackelmore's music, I love this song, and I consider myself a firm supporter of LGBTQ rights, but this notion as presented in an otherwise admirable song is a farce.

On the one hand, there is the principle issue several (though limited) verses in the Bible openly and unambiguously condemn homosexual sexual acts.  Leviticus 18:22 and 20:10, along with the first chapter in the book of Romans, unambiguously condemn homosexual sexual acts as sin.  And let us be clear here, these are not verses taken out of context.  The sections of Leviticus from which these verses are lifted are quite literally lists of rules, more or less designed for lifting individual rules out of textual context and applying them unambiguously to a clear situation - this is why the Levitical law is so seemingly hell-bent on the infinite minutia of different situations - law is, in a sense, meant to be taken out of context and applied, and Leviticus is a book of law.

Furthermore, in Romans 1 it is similarly almost perfectly clear that Paul's condemnation of homosexual sexual acts is explicitly what it seems to be, a condemnation of homosexual sexual acts.  There are arguments on this particular matter that Paul is only talking about unnatural homosexuality, but this presents still more problems.  Several verses throughout the New Testament that do not explicitly mention homosexuality nonetheless prohibit what is variously translated "fornication" or "sexual immorality", and there is no honest examination of what these terms mean in their 1st century context that does not include homosexual sexual acts.

Nonetheless, even with these scriptural points being set aside, the core problem with Mackelmore's assertion (which is shared by a good deal of the vaguely "spiritual" culture in which we live) is that it asserts that those who do not completely accept, embrace and endorse the unmitigated practice of all the actions that fall within the LGBTQ spectrum for Christian religious reasons are in some sense out of touch with a vaguely conceived "original" religion or "original" Christianity that they have contorted through modern and/or recent misconceptions.

This is once more a tempting out, but an examination of history quite simply reveals it to be false.

The simple fact is that, the last 60 or so years being excluded, there has never before been a movement or a current in widespread Christian thought that homosexual sexual acts were acceptable.  Quite to the notable contrary, there is a long tradition reaching back through the ages within the Abrahamic traditions of rather specifically condemning homosexual sexual acts as one particular sin among a great multitude of other sinful acts.

The point here is that if we read the Bible, however long ago it was written, and paraphrase it to say that homosexual sexual acts are sinful - we are not arrogantly disposing of some original conception of God loving all of his children and using our religion to manufacture hate - we are interpreting passages of an admittedly old text in the exact same way they have been interpreted since they were written.  We are, in a word, practicing an unfamiliar pattern of orthodoxy.

G.K. Chesterton in his venerable, but quick book Orthodoxy says that Orthodoxy as an idea is "the democracy of the dead," in other words, that it is the meaningful consideration of what we might call the cloud of witnesses who have lived and died before our time, an appropriate rendering of respect to those who do not have the good fortune to be alive at one particular moment.  It is the idea that people who did something long before us, who passed it on to the people who passed it on to the people who passed it on to us, may have had some idea of what they were doing.

In this particular instance, however unfortunate or unpopular or uncouth it is to say, and whatever other subtleties absolutely must be added to a consideration of LGBTQ rights and practices in modern society and in modern religion, the unpopular idea is the orthodox idea, and whether Mackelmore likes it or not, the conviction that homosexual sexual acts are a sin is the conviction which is most closely tied to the great rope of historical interpretations of the Biblical text.

In summary, my great frustration on this point is that the culture as a whole seems to have adopted this somewhat warped notion as fact.

YES, we must always show the love of Christ to all people and NO, as Pope Francis has pointed out it is not our place to judge other persons and YES, if you ask me, all persons of all sexualities, genders, sexual expressions and gender expressions should all have equal rights and freedoms under every law, everywhere, all the time.

But NO, saying that homosexual sexual acts are not sinful IS NOT more faithful to the 2,000 year long history of Christian doctrine, and no amount of insistence that it is can change the fact that we have 2,000 years of Christian history in which homosexual sexual acts were consistently considered sinful, and as is the nature with Orthodoxy we have a chain reaching back 2,000 years of people in our tradition who have held that position who show us that, unsurprisingly, that was their position

It is unpopular and it is very uncomfortable to assert these matters as a Christian in the 21st century.  It is awkward, it can feel antiquated and it often feels irrelevant.  But it is NOT unorthodox.

The aforementioned second issue, often called the elephant problem, will be addressed in my next article.

the squirrel

the squirrel has no shame

no writhing about for a morsel of fame

no grasping at straws meant to bolster his name

no one to disappoint, none to give any blame

the squirrel, he is free both to run and to be

from the bush to the tree, from a need to fancy

he gathers no monies, he charges no fee

he does not take notice of you or of me

the squirrel has no musings, he knows not our game

our riches, our rags, our disgrace or our fame

Geese

The goose is a proud and a serious race
though he does not wear clothes, not of denim, not of lace.
He struts about to squak and hiss, a stern look on his face
and lest you kill him where he stands he claims, "This is my place!"

Two New Poems

the fool

a sneaking suspicion of certain demise

is all that my thoughts will allow me as prize

for position most envied I run, seek, and gasp

but does this man's reach now exceed this man's grasp?

The task is yet simple, its burthens are few

but in this green temple the gold one screams, "Who?"

"Who are you, small, young man with no tales to impart?"

Just a man, answer I, with some dreams in his heart

on the road, in my hand

promise spoken on the wind

     rise up now, let me send

     regret to shut the mouth which gave you form

simply words, half untruths

     meant to silence and to choose
     a purpose truly driv'n to lose

     a bet to stifle doubt's increasing storm

promise once spoken true

     now for me, first for you

     corset-binding and surrounding like a raging, spiteful swarm

cannot breathe through the veil

     fixed as bones set in shale

     even promise can't prevail

     now let you die in vain, leave me cold, alone and warm

You get a gold star!

*I'll warn you now, this is an article about a facet of gaming culture*

Well, you read the title, didn't you?  Look at the title, now back to me.

You got a gold star!  Congratulations, don't you feel special?

No?  Then you're stupid, and worse than that you're a spoil sport, just trying to ruin everyone's fun.

At least, that's what the gaming industry wants to say to you.  As most of you who are still with me are likely to recall, around the start of the console generation that's currently ending (or in real world terms, mid-2007) Microsoft introduced a crazy new idea to console gaming.  It was called the achievement.  Literally, it was called that.  Everyone who knows what I'm talking about knows that I'm not joking.

The way this works is that when you complete a certain in-game criteria, you hear a little blip, you're treated to a nice little phrase and a cute picture, and then everyone who cares to look (which is no one, let's be frank) can see on your online profile that you've been crowned with the achievement.  This was such a marketing success that Sony jumped in about two year later, demanded that "trophies" be put into all new games and backlogged them into older PS3 games.

Of course the achievements, by one name or another, come in different varieties.  Most games give you at least two or three achievements for essentially nothing but booting up the game.  I can think of a few games I've played where 10 seconds in I literally received an achievement for moving forward.  However, just as the little reassuring blip at the bottom of your screen becomes a nice reminder of your progress, the stakes rise.

The first time your probably straight, white, male protagonist collects one of the thousand gems of wonderment scattered in random, meaningless parts of a meaningless digital world, you get a nice little blip and a trophy to let you know how much of a good boy you've been.  There's probably another at 10, another at 100, and maybe one or two at 500 and 700.  But what the game wants to fire home is that you haven't REALLY played the game unless you get all 1000 of them.  After all, if you do that you get treated to a nice little blip on the bottom of your screen.  Yes, you've wasted several hours of your life but at least you got that gold star.

The same thing is done with difficulty levels, but in a more frustrating way.  Here, the game is literally designed to tell you either respectively how much of a wuss you are for playing the game on easy, barely handing out any achievements for a leisurely, fun, escapist romp through Space Marine Call of Honor 3: This time it's personal, in contrast handing them out like candy in a South American slum if you can somehow manage the blinding, banal, you died because you forgot to cross your toes on the second Tuesday of every fifth month while simultaneously weaving a basket 8 fathoms under boiling salt water torture of the "Veteran" or "Hardcore" difficulty.

Seriously though.

Granted, there are those for whom, apparently, even these vast difficulty levels are like grating cheese, but I have yet to meet one of these wizards, and back here on planet Earth I don't appreciate what the gaming industry has been doing for the last 6 years now.

My biggest problem with all of it is that it is specifically designed to destroy your life.  Just to be clear, I'm not exaggerating there.  King Henry VIII famously said once that time is a man's greatest loss because he can never get it back, and for all of his drunken whoring and church-making he was right on that point.

The whole system of meaning behind achievements is specifically designed so that you waste (not spend as you do when you're just playing the game) your time so that a paltry blip on the bottom of your screen and a quick little pun can make you feel better about yourself.

So buck the system!  Go out, buy a game and play it on easy.  Don't feel ashamed of yourself, just enjoy it.  The whole point of gaming as a medium tends to be that one has fun while playing the game, whatever way one might want to.  All that achievements do as a thing is tell you how to have your fun, whether or not you've had enough quite yet, and remind you that if you were really having fun the way you were supposed to, you'd be doing what the achievement tells you to do.

Congratulations, you made it to the end of the post.  You get a PLATINUM star! 

With all the force of a great typhoon

So the other day I went to a mass at St. Francis Catholic Church in Madison, Mississippi.  Having not been to mass in a while, I was elated as the priest ascended the central podium of a wide, circular meeting-tent style church and announced that the introductory hymn would be number such and such, Holy, Holy, Holy.  Having grown up a Protestant, this was one of many more popular classic hymns with which I am thoroughly familiar, so I was thrilled as I found the hymn in the book and stood to sing.  Then, around the first time we finished the chorus I noticed that something was wrong.  Looking up and carefully observing the crowd I quickly found the problem.

Almost all of the men in the church were silent.

"What," I thought to myself, "this is only one of the best hymns ever!  Why would anyone not sing to this?  How could these ingrates be so ungrateful as to not sing one of the most kick-ass songs of worship written in the last 200 years?"  The answer came to me by the next song we sang, an all too familiar problem with church music.

It's just too damn high.

At St. Francis, the worship leader was a small, stout older lady with a beautiful, calming soprano voice.  Her vocals, accompanied by a wonderful flute and the obligatory piano, provided the basis for the worship setting, and I'm sure that she meant well.  However, most men (if I remember my science correctly) are either basses or baritones naturally, which means their comfortable range (in my experience and the experience of my fellows) ranges from approximately a low G to a high B, give or take a not or two.  Of course there are a large number of men who are tenors, but even these, when they are not trained, can have a hard time rising above a solid D or E.  Meanwhile, worship music (of catholic and protestant varieties) tends to be written for tenor and soprano high voices, meaning that the high points of melodies will hang out comfortable around D and E, often rising as far as high F and high G for melodic effect.

Only serving to exacerbate the problem, whether you're singing hymns or Chris Tomlin choruses, the melodies of the songs are meant to be belted out and sung in a full voice.  For persons like myself who are basses or baritones (again, the majority of men) this is more than difficult, it's uncomfortable.  I've spent several years of my life in choirs and voice lessons, and even for me it is hard to sing a nice D or E at a volume and tone appropriate to a worship setting.  I can only imagine how bad it must be for my fellows who aren't as well versed in the vocal arts.

The eventual result of this focus on high melody is that, as is the case in most churches I have attended, most men simply don't sing in church.  At times when the congregation is supposed to be lifting their collective voice in collaborative praise, at least half of the congregation is more or less unintentionally excluded because the music simply does not fit their vocal range.

What's always frustrating to me, as a performer, is that this problem is by no means necessary.  First of all, there's the ever-present option of simply dropping the key of worship songs so that they fit in a more comfortable range.  This is not always doable for everyone, either for technical reasons pertaining to the musicians in a worship team or because some songs are written in such a way that dropping the key would make the ladies generally unable to participate.

However, churches throughout the 19th and early 20th century made a regular habit of actually having their congregations sing in 4 part harmony.  Having performed in many choirs, I recognize that this is difficult to achieve, but I think that this solution is under-utilized in the modern church.  4-part singing can provide a wonderful allusion to the different functions of different pieces of the body of Christ, and it is furthermore simply more comfortable.

Still, I acknowledge that in some congregations, forcing or offering 4 part congregational singing is either impractical or simply not doable.

Nonetheless, it is certainly at least one of several important issues facing the church that men, who make up normally half the population of a community and who, in many churches, are the sole proprietors of the ordained ministry, are generally not singing.  We must all find a way to alleviate this problem.  Perhaps this means that we don't sing Chris Tomlin choruses, or that our gloria will be a much more simple (dare I say maybe even boring) melody, but in the end it is more acceptable to do different music or less exciting music than it is to essentially exclude half of a congregation from participation in musical worship.

A Short Story: why not?

I know I've been absent lately, and that I have yet to really get my series on Same-Sex-Marriage off the ground.  But I wrote this.  Feel free to read it.  Or don't.  But you're already here, so go ahead and read it.

“I’ll do it”, the creature cried from the high place.  “I’ll jump, I’ll do it.”

The place was indeed very high.  The fall would be fatal.  A group of people gathered below the creature.  A woman stepped forward.  She was too old to go dancing, but too young to know the terror of a grown child.  “I’m sure you have a family somewhere, she said, and I’m sure they wouldn’t want you to do this,” she began.

“Just think how horrified they’ll be if they learn you’ve done it.  Think of your mother, think of how she’ll be horrified.  What about your Dad and how it will shake his confidence in himself?  What about all the cousins and aunts and uncles that will miss you at Christmas and Thanksgiving.  Think about how sad everyone will be when Uncle Bill says, ‘if only it hadn’t happened’  and when cousin Angela says ‘it really was such a terrible loss’.

The creature was silent.  A man stepped forward.  He was the kind you would see in a coffee shop, not a regular, just a visitor, or the kind who lines his walls with classics he does not read.  “But wait,” he began, his well-trimmed goatee lifted high above his clever corduroy jacket and his color-coordinated fitted pants of indiscriminate stylish material.

“Surely you know that your life has meaning in and of itself.  All life is valuable, especially sentient life.  You carry within yourself a divine spark.  If you believe in God, be assured that he loves you.  If you don’t, be assured that your life carries value, regardless of all external circumstances.  Be of good cheer, oh friend I have yet to meet, for whether it be Darwin or Falwell who is correct you are the product of a long, ingenious process and you have value for simply being yourself, a unique and improbable expression of a unique and improbable species.  Descend, therefore, and follow not this terminal course of action.”

The creature was once more silent.  A young woman stepped forward.  Her bright, mismatched colors said more about her personality and life experience than any words ever could.  “But most of all,” she began, “remember that life is just worth living.”

“I mean, come on, think about it for a second.  Life is just so wonderful if you look in the right places.  Go out for a cup of coffee, listen to a songbird, go to a concert or whatever you want to do.  There’s so much of the world out there that you probably haven’t even started to explore.  Come down and go find life the way it’s meant to be lived.”

Still the creature was silent.  The three who had stepped forward were perplexed.  The air hung still, and the thought of death hung heavy and cold over the scene like a wet woolen coat.

An old man didn’t bother to step forward.  His rosewood cane, onto which he had failed to mount a rubber stopper, took the place of a gavel as it racked about and broke the tasteful silence.  As the persons near to him inched away, he let out a long, deep cough that trailed off into sputtering and then more silence.  Deliberately silent, he pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket.  This whole rest was followed by a sforzando of coughing and hacking which subsided into a decrescendo deep breath which stood at a nice mezzo piano.  “Do it,” he sputtered out, flatly.

“This bitch over here thinks you have yet to consider your family or how they’re going to feel.  We both know that you have.  You’re standing up there, relishing the fact that news crews and policemen and paramedics are on their way.  You’re going to love all of that attention, however this works out.  You don’t think you did it for the attention, but whether or not it was a motivation, that’s why you’re standing up there.  If you really wanted to go quietly into that dark night, there are a few thousand ways an idiot like you could kill themselves quietly in an apartment or a back alley.

No, you’re here, at this high place, so that all of them can see, aren’t you?  You want them to hurt and languish and say ‘oh if only I had done this’ or ‘why didn’t I pay more attention when such and such a thing happened.’  That’ll show ‘em, right?  That’ll make ‘em wish they’d treated you better.

And this jackass over here thinks you have somehow managed to not absorb the McPhilosophy that’s seeped into the deepest corners of every educational system and every movie and every dramatic TV special everywhere, or that if you have absorbed it, you need only be reminded of the orthodox opinion to return once again to the great conformity.  He believes that bullshit, but you and me, we know how to call a duck a duck.

You know you’re fucking worthless, or at least you want to think you are.  If you don’t think you are, or if you’re not sure, I’ll tell you now that you are.  There’s no such thing as a sure-fire inalienable human center that gives us a special privilege over the beasts of the earth, and however fantastic our circumstances are we both know that perhaps you and I and everyone else are products of an incredibly, complex, well-organized pile of steaming shit.

And then this one here wants you to take a deep whiff and call it roses.  She’s close to correct, closer than she thinks.  There is a big, beautiful world out there, there are places to be and people to see and things to do, but in ascending the mountain of self-devaluation you have made it clear to all of us that you don’t want to do any of that.

You are worthless, so get the hell down, one way or another.

You are wasting my time, their time and your time.  You have decided that life is not worth living and that your oh-so-sensitive soul can no longer bear its slings and arrows.  Fine.  Do it.

You are worth exactly nothing until you decide that you are worth something.  At this point you seem to have decided on the former.  So either commit to that decision and embrace your meaningless end or get down here and decide that you are worth something.  Go out and make yourself worth something.  Do some important shit in some unimportant place to make it, and yourself, important.  Or don’t.  Until you do one, you’ll just be standing there, wasting my time and wallowing in your non-existant worth.”

The creature was silent.  And then, in an instant, the creature decided.

Mawwiage: The Surface of the Same-Sex Debate

"The word of the Lord came to me: 'Son of man, speak to your people and say to them: ‘When I bring the sword against a land, and the people of the land choose one of their men and make him their watchman, and he sees the sword coming against the land and blows the trumpet to warn the people, then if anyone hears the trumpet but does not heed the warning and the sword comes and takes their life, their blood will be on their own head.  Since they heard the sound of the trumpet but did not heed the warning, their blood will be on their own head. If they had heeded the warning, they would have saved themselves.  But if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet to warn the people and the sword comes and takes someone’s life, that person’s life will be taken because of their sin, but I will hold the watchman accountable for their blood.'"
-Ezekiel 33:1-6

Given the recent public light that has been shed on same-sex marriage, I have decided to tackle the issue for own writing pleasure.  I would like to set forth as a disclaimer now that I do not mean to offend anyone with anything that I say on either side of this issue, but in a similar vein I will not apologize for offending anyone.  I intend no harm, and I assure all of you that I will avoid being disrespectful, but I cannot predict the myriad of ways that anyone may be offended by what I say and I do not intend to compromise any of my positions in the slightest.

Now that that's over with,

The central question here, as I understand it, is whether or not same-sex marriage should be legal in the United States of America.  I do not know the legal systems of any other locales well enough to judge them, but I will do my best to base my arguments on generalized systems of morality and legality.

Speaking of which,

Most people, especially Christians, have an annoying habit of separating morality and legality on tough issues like Same-Sex Marriage, Marijuana, Abortion, Torture, and Underwater Basket-Weaving.  Somewhat obviously, I oppose the separation.

There are those who say, "You can't legislate morality."

Those people are wrong.

You can't legislate people into a corner where they have to behave morally (I mean, you can, but it doesn't work out and it usually violates civil liberties), but legislation is nothing more than general morality applied to specific situations with punishments attached to infractions.

Example:
1)  It's wrong to kill people
2)  Sometimes, people kill other people (often with guns)
3)  If you kill someone, you will face legal recourse.

Bam.  You just legislated morality.

This being the case, the most useful place to start in asking the question, "Should guys be allowed to marry guys and girls be allowed to marry girls?" is in morality.

As a firm Utilitarian, I am compelled to start with Utilitarian morals.  Does preventing Same-Sex Marriage cause any suffering?  Yes, it clearly does.  Clearly, people who are homosexual and want to marry experience some level of suffering at not being allowed to legally marry, otherwise they wouldn't seek the right to marry.

More importantly, does allowing Same-Sex Marriage cause any suffering, or at least are there any obviously predictable negative effects?  Well, gay couples as parents are statistically no better or worse than straight parents at raising their children, according to most normative standards of child-rearing, so there's no obvious detriment to the children.

As far as others are concerned, certainly there will be a number of people made very upset by the marriage of dudes to other dudes and girls to other girls, but I frankly have to say that the pleasure gained by people allowed to freely marry one another is probably amazingly greater than the frustration and suffering of those who don't want people of the same sex to marry one another.

I can't think of any obvious societal cost to allowing people of the same sex to marry one another.

Some say that it will degrade marriage as an institution, but I, for one, think that's a bit of a moot point in a society with divorce rates somewhere around 50%.  

Some say that the infertility present in same sex couples sours marriage by making it primarily the concern of two adults, not the concern of a family unit.  Again though, I think a 50% divorce rate is solid evidence that we as a society have abandoned the concept of marriage as concerning a family unit, so while the point is true, it is not obvious that same-sex couples would in any way worsen a trend that already exists.  Furthermore, many same-sex couples adopt, which further weakens this point.

So why not?  Why not have the Pope perform a ceremony between Adam and Steve, and for the hell of it have him do the ceremony live on Ellen?

We'll let that one stand until the next post.  Until then though, it's been wonderful.

-J.R.M.C.

School's out.

So the other day I was muching on some sausage (NOT LIKE YOU'RE THINKING DIRTY INTERNET!)  Anyway I was chewing a delightful fried polish sausage with garlic-wasabi fried rice, carrots and celery when I decided to hold the biannual Rob-pulls-his-head-up-out-of-the-sand-rubs-his-eyes-and-decides-to-look-around-and-see-what's-going-on-in-his-life session.  Then I decided it sounded like more fun to watch the newly added Cartoon Network lineup on Netflix and I postponed the session until the next day, I wasn't doing anything important like re-watching Batman Beyond the next day.

So there I was the next other day, calmly walking along in the woods, minding my own business and bothering no one at all when a coordinated set of inbred expectations snuck up and jumped me just past the bubbling creek.  While one of them was busy whacking me about the head and face with my imminent graduation from college, another was punching me in the stomach with time-based development objectives, another still was kicking me in the kneecaps with career uncertainty, a fourth stood there yelling, "WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WITH YOUR LIFE?!"   All the while a final one seemed content to hop around on a neon polo stick while consuming a delicious burrito.

I was more or less instantly beset with anxiety about more or less everything.  Beyond the normal "Who am I", and "What is my purpose", there were creeping in "Where am I going to live", "How will I pay for food", "What if I can't get a job", and "How the hell am I supposed to get a job with my degree that does not involve either changing religions or giving up the womenfolk?"

Clearly it was a desperate situation.

I like me some womenfolk.

Being terrified and frozen in place (metaphorically of course, a walk where you're frozen in place quickly becomes awkward, what with all the just standing there) I decided to go back to my room and hop onto the PS3, where I committed acts of brutal competitive violence on complete strangers for a few hours, after which I had a nice dinner, a soothing warm bath and good night's sleep.

The next day I woke up with that awful feeling of regret and terror that comes with ignoring expectation-based fears, when I suddenly realized that what I had done (the whole ignoring it and doing anything other than worrying bit) was really the best thing I could have done at all.

The scriptures say "Today's trouble is enough for today," and "who, by worrying, can add one minute to his life?"  I don't mean that playing video games and eating fried sausage and yellow rice topped in french cut green beans with a cream-cheese/wasabi gravy is always the right decision, but I do mean that when one is tempted to worry, my experience leads me to believe that worrying is the last thing one should be doing.

Again, I don't mean that everyone should become a couch potato and throw caution to the wind.  Caution is a good thing, and it helps us avoid stupid decisions.  But sitting there, languishing in terror of what's to come is something the scriptures (and all common sense) advise against.  I have no idea what I'll be doing or where I'll be in May or in September, but I'll be somewhere and things will take care of themselves.  I know where I want to be, I have a solid idea of some places where I don't want to be, and I think I'm smart enough to avoid the latter and pursue the former.

Relax.  Don't make stupid decisions, but keep on living.  Things will probably work out okay, and if they don't, how much does it really matter?

It's been wonderful,

-J.R.M.C.

The Problem with Star Trek...

I have a problem with Star Trek.

Okay, I have three problems with Star Trek.

The first problem I have is that Star Trek: The Next Generation is not still running and that Patrick Stewart is not still delivering weekly five minute dissertations on the fundamental value of life itself or the inalienable rights of every sentient individual.

The second problem is also that TNG is not still running.

It's a big problem for me.

My third problem, and I guess you would call this the "serious" one, is with the narrative of human progress that the collective Star Trek mythos presents.

I'm not the most careful observer, but the general idea that the original series put forward was that the UN dissolved around the 70s or 80s, there were some eugenics wars around the 80s or 90s, and then, as chronicled in First Contact humans discover warp-level technology, and then they more or less become better at not being awful to one another as more technologies are implemented as as technology allows them access to better, more peaceful cultures.

It's a cool story, and thank God it's not (so far) the situation into which things have devolved.  Nonetheless, the conclusion the narrative seems to present is that it's more or less REALLY science and technology that will variously inspire or enable us to stop hating each other and killing one another.

Note that it's not the slow, painful matter of working through deep-seated ethnic, cultural, religious and historical issues between persons and groups of people.  It's not the careful, calculated and coordinated efforts of hard-working, like-minded people making hard compromises that forges a long, lasting and just peace, it's the magic hand of science and technology reaching down and bringing humanity out of the swamps of diplomacy and, quite literally, into the future.

Granted, that's not the narrative of technology presented by the whole series, and several episodes centered on the "prime directive" emphasize that technology does not equal progress.  Nonetheless, what could be called the creation narrative of Star Trek does at least have pieces of that philosophy.

My bigger point here is that technology is not going to save us.  Certainly, it helps: it can and it will.

The only thing that can save mankind from itself is the careful cooperation of brave men and women across faith lines, borders, embargoes and other artificial boundaries.  We can make the world a better place, we have that ability, but the only way to do that is to cooperate with one another, slowly and carefully, one person to one person at a time.

Half-boats and Whole Commitments

I apologize for my extended absence.  I intend on dealing with its cause herein, and I henceforth intend to write at least one and probably no more than three posts a week.  Anyway...

I've always thought that one of life's more interesting paradoxes is that, for most people (and by most people I mean "me") intentional productivity and free time have an almost perfectly indirect correlation.  Three years ago, as a freshman taking 18 credits, I did all of my homework in all of my classes, maintained stable relationships with both of my parents and a significant other, read 5 books, got in pretty decent shape, successfully gave up meat for lent and, in my classes, learned most of the important basic principles that I still use today.

This semester, I have 12 credits, 4 of which are music classes.  Another two are essentially a trip to Manhattan that I'll be taking next week, and then I have two "normal" classes.  Most of my time is free and available for my personal use.  If you combine all of the hours I spend in class on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, you only come out with a measly four hours out of 72.  What have I accomplished with all of this glorious free time?

Nothing.  More or less, nothing.  I finished watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, watched all of House of Cards, started DS9 and Voyager, and really that's it.  I have hit a rut in my productivity, and I think this kind of thing is fairly common for most people.  I think it has something to do with needing to manage your time well when you're busy and not really needing to when you're free, but I won't bother with speculation, I've simply noticed the correlation.

Since this state in which I lack any semblance of productive activity is unacceptable, I recently sought out the advice of one of the many wise friends with whom the Blessed Father has seen fit to bless me.  I told him my predicament, my lack of motivation and my lack of anything really meaningful, and what he said to me was so wise and so practical that I'll do my best to say exactly what he told me.  He said:

"What you need is a boat.  Or rather, you need HALF a boat and a garage.  Then, what you do is go down into that garage every Saturday afternoon or every evening or with every moment of free time you have and you work on your half boat.  You go to home depot and buy things, come back and measure them, return them to home depot and buy different things that fit better so that bit by bit what you have is less like half a boat and more like a whole boat.  If you do this long enough, you end up with an actual whole boat, then you step back and say to yourself, 'I don't even live near a body of water, what am I going to do with a boat?'  It's at that point that you realize that all along the point wasn't REALLY to have a boat or even to build a boat, the point was to struggle and work and to care about something for long enough that the struggle made you a better person."

My friend can correct me if I've remembered his advice incorrectly.

Nonetheless, I took it to heart and I think I have a solid idea for a half-boat, but that's not important.  What's important is that I know plenty of people out there are either A) feeling unproductive or B) will at some point in the future feel unproductive.  My big mistake in the past has been that I've allowed myself to waste those precious moments, so my personal advice to you (and even more so to myself) is to find that half-boat and work on it until your fingers are raw and your brow is sweaty with tireless effort.

Work on it until it means something and embrace that meaning with everything you have, because real meaning is hard to come by in this world.

On a final note, for those who are curious, my half-boat is a play about a group of people who run a Bed and Breakfast together.  Don't ask me any questions about it because that's as much as I'm going to let slip.  Anyway, go in the peace of the Lord and do your best to stay happy and healthy!

It's been wonderful,

-J.R.M.C.

Broken Promises

"Religion in general compensates for the fact that modern society doesn't deliver us what it promises." - Dr. Jeffrey McPherson

I won't quote anyone specific at you, but the simple fact is that when religion is taken out of the equation, Western people measure their success in life with only two factors: the status of their work lives, their professional accomplishments, and the status of their personal lives, generally measured by the amount and quality of their personal relationships.  These lives are generally distinct from one another, but more importantly they are the primary evaluative mechanisms of modern society.  An example will help.

If I were to walk up to you some time tomorrow and tell you that my friend John is very successful, you would imagine that he is either gainfully employed or engaged in an educational path that will make him so, and that he similarly partakes in fulfilling relationships with his family and friends.  There will be some other nonsense about happiness somewhere in there, but this is mostly assumed to derive from the fact that he's financially successful and has fulfilling relationships.

We covered this general topic today in a class I'm taking with the aforementioned Dr. McPherson, and we specifically covered the fact that these are both lies.

The great English philosopher Thomas Hobbes had a good deal correct when he said that men are dangerous, not because they seek happiness, but because the happiness that they seek is only found when they have both met their needs and desires and ensured that they will forevermore have those same needs and desires met.  In other words, what Hobbes is saying is that having $500 in your pocket will make any person happy, but most people will only be happy if they can ensure that a continuous stream of cash will supplement that $500, enough to sustain a comfortable, enjoyable existence.  Without that security, without knowing that tomorrow and the day after and the day after that will also be fine, most people tend to not be happy.

This becomes a problem in the modern world, because our primary indicator of status and success is directly tied to our occupations.  One man is a cashier at McDonald's, another is the teller at a bank and still another owns the bank.  We would probably evaluate these men, given no other criteria, as being progressively more successful.  The problem with the modern world is that in an instant, that can change.  To be fair, people at all times in history have been at the mercy of their employers, but workers (or those seeking work) in the modern age definitely seek a more ruthless kind of devaluation.  Workers are hired and fired at the whims of employers in the modern world because they tend to be almost completely replaceable.  If Jerry who works as a cashier begins acting up and making it clear that he believes he has earned a raise for himself, it is usually easier to find someone to replace him in his meaningless job than it is to give him a raise: and most employers will do just that.

This problem stretches on and on throughout the modern workforce: valuable, skilled people lose their jobs daily because "the company is going in a new direction" or because they've just been off of their game for the last few months.  Thus, one of our primary methods of self-valuation and of evaluating others is, at least in the modern world, as ephemeral and vulnerable as a mist on a windy day.

"That's fine," some might say, "I actually derive my personal value from my relationships."

...okay, I'll admit that I may be the only person I know that would actually say those words, but you get my point.

The problem is that this often over-burdens our relationships.  There's a reason that we all buy into the Hollywood myth of the perfect love story: we want it.  There's an intimacy and a meaningfulness in our love myth that's lacking in our professional lives, and we want our lives to mean something the way that lives (and loves) in the rom-com do.  Who doesn't want their life to be enveloped in fulfillment and deep personal intimacy with Zooey Deschanel?

Maybe I'm getting too biographical...

Anyway, the point is that we take all of the meaning and weight that we can no longer derive from our occupations (given their ephemeral nature) and we thrust all the impetus for our personal meaning onto our personal relationships.  The really funny thing is that we are then genuinely surprised when our relationships leave us emotionally drained and longing for respite.

Another problem with our relationships is that in the modern world, more than ever before, our relationships are disposable.  If tomorrow I decided to permanently cease all contact with my family members, relocate to Denver, Colorado and start a new life in which I didn't utilize social media, the thing that would give most of my new friends a feeling of uneasiness and distrust about me would not be that I seemingly had no family, no friends and no life prior to January 29th, 2013, it would be that I didn't use social media!

We live in an era where the single most "meaningful" aspect of our lives can be put on and taken off like a ratty sweater whenever we want.

So, in the end, we have two criterion for happiness and personal success, both of which can be ripped out from under us at a moment's notice, completely outside of any control we might exert.

Feeling happy yet?

It's no wonder then that so many people turn to religions to derive their meaning.  As the quote at the beginning of this diatribe reiterated, we are promised the world.

Chuck Palahniuk says in Fight Club, "we grew up believing we would end up as rock stars and pro football players," we have been fed the lie that if we work hard and do our best to be nice we will have great, rewarding jobs and fantastic personal lives and that these will give us meaning.

Then we put out 18 applications to fast food restaurants, get a college degree, try and fail in our personal relationships and we're left with no money, no means to acquire it, the shame of living under someone else's roof, and none of the interpersonal comforts that are supposed to make it all feel better.

What religion does, whether it's true or false, is provide us with a metaphysical, invisible system by which we can look at a lonely, unemployed life and still say two ourselves: 1) I am unconditionally meaningful 2) Things are going to eventually get better for me, and 3) All of this bad stuff really might not be my fault, and even if it is, I'll eventually be okay as long as I behave.  Not always, but they usually tend to offer some solid advice as well.

I dare you to find a religion that doesn't do that.  I don't even mean the big ones, although they also fit those parameters.  Look at Mormonism, Scientology, Satanism, Neo-Paganism, old paganism, greek mystery religion, theravada Buddhism, shinto Buddhism, etc.

Again, I'm not trying to say anything about the truth or untruth of religious claims.  I for one am a Catholic, and a proud one at that.  But even though I believe that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is an historical fact, I do acknowledge that my whole worldview does a pretty good job at telling me that I'm unconditionally meaningful, that eventually, no matter what, things are going to get better, and that most of the evil in the world, even when it happens to me, isn't my fault at the core.  And where it is, I can fix that.

Those are comforting thoughts in any time period, but especially in ours they offer a powerful impetus.

That's enough for now, but tomorrow we'll tackle truth claims.

It's been wonderful,

     J.R.M.C.

Untitled - A return to poetry.

I haven't posted a poem in a while, so here's one for your viewing pleasure.

Depart from me,
     cruel visage of my defeat.
Pale spheres of grief which linger lifeless and lull me to lunacy,
Captivating paradigm of peace, prosper not and project thyself from my presence!
Prostrate and pummeled with pain I plead with you!
Show me not the magnified curves of your continental countenance before which I cower and crawl, crazed and confused by your cold, crisp charisma.
And yet,
Look!
You turn about to assault me once more!
What foul torment is this faceless fate which fondles my fantasies and forges them fated for failure?
Come to me no more!
May your lovely and ludicrous lens let languish my long, lamenting labors
and close!

Some things never change.

"Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end."

As most of you are aware, I'm at the beginning of my final undergraduate semester at Robert's Wesleyan College.  I've taken all of my important classes, I've passed them, I've learned a great deal and soon enough it will be time to move on out into the "real world".  In a very real sense, I'm facing a new beginning.  Wherever I end up going to graduate school, I'll be moving away from Rochester, starting graduate school and beginning my academic career in earnest (assuming that I get into a grad program.)  No matter what, I'll be packing up, shipping out and doing something genuinely new in about four months, and I'll be doing it in a genuinely new place.

As an army brat, there's literally nothing new to me about the process.  The next few months will be hard as I wrap up and end most of my relationships at Roberts, the month or two which follow will be difficult and exciting as I forge new relationships, and then life will assume a normal rythym again.  

The only thing I would call into question is the whole notion of a "new beginning".

Let me put it this way: no one that I know here at Roberts will join me at grad school, and based on the locations of my choices no one that I even know will either.  I'll be in a new place, at a new school, in a new program doing new (and from what I hear, horrendous) amounts of work.  All of that is both new and true, but I'm still going to be the same person.  My experiences at Roberts (and every other place I've ever been) have still formed me into a certain kind of person, and the same can be said for every person with whom I've interacted

I can change where I am, and I can change what I'm doing, but the decisions I've made and the habits I've formed will always form my basic self.  I'm still the one who's going, and it will be my past experiences that determine how I interpret and react to the events around me when I get wherever I'm going.  It's not a new beginning, it's just a different set of circumstances.

It's not even really that fundamental of a change, frankly.  And even if it was, I'm still the same person, and I'm not dead or dying, so it's still the same story.

If Shakespeare had written "The Chronicle of Horatio" and wove a grand tale of how, after Hamlet's death, Horatio left on a ship for the orient and took over a small province there, Horatio would still be the same character, and would probably still react the same way to most situations he encountered, and he would probably fulfill a similar role.

My deeper point is this: we always choose who we are, either directly or indirectly, with every decision that we make.  Thus, if we move ourselves to a different place, even if we start doing different things, the likelihood that anything will actually change is negligible at best.  You got where you are and I got where I am by being a certain kind of person and acting a certain kind of way.  It may seem hopeless to say it, but in all likelihood none of us are likely to fundamentally change the roles we fill, ever.

So then, my point would be that this isn't a "new beginning" because they don't exist.  Every moment is an opportunity to create a self, and moving around the scenery doesn't do one thing to change who we are or how we react.