Hyperbole Will Surely Be the Death of Us All !!!!!!

What happened in Tucson is tragic. It seems pretty obvious that Jared Lee Loughner is really messed up. A kid expelled from his local community college for mental health reasons and concern for public safety should be in regular treatment, and should not be able to legally purchase a Glock. Private citizens cannot legally purchase the magazine he used which allowed him to rapidly fire so many rounds into the heads and bodies of folks just like you, me, our parents and kids. Whoever illegally sold the magazine to him should be tried as an accessory to murder and never be allowed within 1000 yards of a firearm again.

I get all that. I think just about every reasonable human being would agree with everything stated above.

As a slightly left-leaning down-the-middler, I also get the frustration and disgust with the current state of political discourse. I avoid Glen Beck, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, WHAM, and - for that matter - Keith Olberman and Ed Schultz. I find NPR to be much more level-headed in everything short of knee-jerk personnel decisions.

I don't like Sarah Palin as a candidate. I'm of the opinion that if she was physically unattractive she'd be back home in Wasila. Forever. She'd better quickly hit the books and gain some gravitas, because gravity is already beginning to address that which attracted the spotlight to her in the first place. (I can say that because I'm pushing 50, too.)

But here is where I find myself drawing the line: I can't find Sarah Palin, Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh or partisan bluster remotely responsible for a sick kid who did a sick thing. I firmly believe the above listed politainers play fast and loose with facts when they bother with facts at all. I firmly believe they further poison the already brackish political waters (and, again, I'd throw Keith Olberman and his constant faux outrage into the same pot). I firmly believe they make it very difficult to reach out and reason with "the other side of the aisle," no matter which side you're on.

But I find my conservative acquaintances to be among the most upright and law-abiding citizens I know. Even if I can't talk politics with them, I know I can trust them personally. Some of them own legal fire arms. As far as I know, none of them has ever so much as pointed a steak knife at another human being. Conservative anger -- or even hubris -- is not a crime. And even if political vitriol might speak to some armed-to-the-teeth psychopath,  ornate wallpaper patterns and the neighbor's dog do, too.

I very much want to end the political polarization of this nation. How can we do that when we take our own accusations to such polar extremes?

Joy

I had a moment yesterday during worship.

Cheryl Walters and Earl Petit were singing a stunning version of "O Holy Night." I mean free-flowing-tears-among-the-congregation stunning. It was that beautiful. I was sitting up on the pulpit dias behind our singers, a perfect vantage point to watch the emotion swirl and roll through the pews.

Third Sunday of Advent means I was about to preach a sermon on joy. As I sat there looking out on the people with whom I've ministered and to whom I have preached for 14 years, I started calling up some of the sacred, private moments into which I have been welcomed:

• my dear, lovely friend who has embraced her too-soon widowhood as a challenging, sometimes-solitary adventure, and whose homily when the grief was so fresh two Easters ago - on joy as something for which we must decide to reach and work - still sticks with me every day,
• the widower facing his first Christmas without the physical presence of his remarkable, Spirit-filled wife 
• the beautiful, fun and friendly couple who are silently going together through a profound grief quite similar to one Teresa and I once experienced,
• the man who went two years powerless and unemployed before suddenly finding potential employers beating down his door,
• the great, great grandmother,
• the sister who suffered mightily convincing her mother to leave the homestead she loves for a safer environment.

So many people. So many cycles of tragedy and triumph, all together in a moment of deep, profound beauty. A thrill of hope. A weary world rejoices.

"Merry Christmas" doesn't begin to cover it, does it? Joy is something so hard-won and all-encompassing. It warms us to the core through some of the coldest of human experiences. It doesn't whistle past graveyards or drown out sighs and tears with staged laughter. Joy is planted firmly in what is and who we are.

In that moment, I saw an entire congregation make the conscious decision to reach for joy. For some, I knew, it took heroic effort. God bless them.

Merriment distracts. Joy completes. 

Please don't settle for a merry Christmas. Reach for joy.

me and radio

Two memories:

FIRST: I'm a young kid of seven or eight. My sister and I are in the back seat and it is once again past our regular bedtime. Dad's driving. Mom's riding shotgun. The push-button car radio (AM only, thank you very much) provides hokie music, then news. The magic minute of 10:07 p.m. arrives, and the creaking door and croaking tone (of E.G. Marshall) usher in CBS Radio Mystery Theatre on WHAM. Mom is concerned it will scare the kids too much this late at night. She doesn't realize I listen to it almost every night in my room, under the covers, through the earphone on my little transistor radio. She's right, of course: That show, coupled with my vivid imagination, are far too scary for this time of night. Got to listen, though, because the dark bedroom to come with all its sinister shadows is half the fun.

SECOND: I'm a little older, maybe 11 or 12, and I alone am awake in the house at 3 a.m.  I am rattled and anxious -- no doubt part of the teeth-grinding, mind-twisting crossing-of-days that was adolescence. I'm going out of my mind, staring at the ceiling, feeling every sting of yesterday's junior high social slings and arrows, and hearing every crack and groan of that old house. I reach under my bed, and there's that same old transistor radio, mostly thrown over for album sides and eight-tracks, but still faithful. I turn it on (the nine-volt is still juiced!) and find WSAY on the dial, just as the DJ drops the needle on Nights in White Satin (the full, poetry- and kettle-drum-soaked album version, of course...I mean, we're talking about WSA-freakin'-Y here). I breathe deep, comforted, close my eyes and drift away.



I have always loved radio. From those early days with it's constant, time-marking presence to today. When I was 17 it was WCMF and WMJQ hanging with me at the house before school; Mom and Dad being long gone to work, and me fighting off the morning lonelies. When I was 19 and suddenly came to myself in Fortran 77 class, rose and walked out on the day's lecture and my ill-chosen Computer Science major, it was the studios of Brockport State's student-run WBSU to which I turned.

Within two years, I was station manager. Within three years, I was out in the broadcasting world, Communication degree in hand, hosting a jazz show in the very-same studio where some DJ had once sat and played Nights in White Satin at 3 a.m. all those years ago (by then it was WXXI-AM, which has long-since moved from that odd house/studio on French Road that they had inherited from Gordon Brown's scattershot, eccentric experiment in freeform acid rock/Roman Catholic radio).

In the ensuing years I have DJ-ed and produced off an on, but mostly I have listened. I have listened and loved Garrison Keillor, Diane Rhem, Terri Gross, Click-and-Clack, Bob Smith, Bob Matthews and Bob Edwards. I have continued to root against the Yankees, but for the broadcast team of Suzyn Waldman (a brilliant baseball mind) and John Sterling ("th-uhhhhh pitch..."calling every single game without fail since 1989). I have listened and winced at the invective of many current talk-radio hosts, but have begrudgingly recognized the consummate skill with which they deliver it.

Radio. No other broadcast medium allows you to cast heroes and villains from your own imagination. No other broadcast medium can quite crawl inside you while you are busy doing other things. It still travels the open air, seeps in your ear and dances in your head with whatever it finds on your mind at the time. What are your memories of radio?

(And now a word from our sponsor: On Friday, December 3rd at 7 p.m., our church will be transformed into old-time radio studio WBCC for A Bloomfield Home Companion, complete with  radio-theatre comedy and drama produced live before your eyes, our own house band burning up the music of Patsy Cline, Old Crow Medicine Show, Hank Williams, Bing Crosby, and Lucinda Williams, and special displays and archived broadcasts provided by the Antique Wireless Association Museum. Tickets are a mere eight bucks!)

Why I'm Wearing Purple Today

...and not just me, but my whole family.

• I am wearing purple today because I have come to realize that failure to stand up and proclaim what I believe is shameful for me, and potentially fatal to others.
• I am wearing purple today because GLBT youth are far, far more likely to take their own life, inflicting great loss on a world that has seemingly rejected them. 
• I am wearing purple today because I have presided at funerals of suicide victims, and have seen firsthand the chaos and ongoing pain generated and passed on.
• I am wearing purple today because I must not sit idly by as others fly the banner of Christianity over actions, outlooks and messages I find the antithesis of my Christ and his message. 
• I am wearing purple today because I want to show those who feel isolated and cast out that they are not alone at all.
• I am wearing purple today because I want to show the vociferous, misguided few who spew anti-gay venom that they are very much alone, and to rebut their profoundly mistaken belief that  bigotry, hate and ignorance are somehow Christian or Conservative or American values. 
• I am wearing purple today to shake up the "silent majority" of kids and adults who, if they themselves don't call something "gay" in derision, sit silently complicit when others do. 

I'm not big on contrived public displays, but I hope every young person struggling with issues of identity and orientation sees a veritable SEA of purple acceptance and understanding today. A public display is the only way to make that happen.

My wise friend Kristin shared the other day her distaste for the word "tolerance."I agree. I don't care to be "tolerated." I want to be appreciated. Don't we all?

AMEN.

(Being) Meat is Murder

Did you see this dress?

As a once and future vegetarian, I understand the whole meat-is-murder argument. In fact, given the recent factory farming crises in the beef, poultry and egg industries, I'd hope every sentient being would have an idea by now that, for omnivores, local and compassionate is the way to go for such things (eggs? try the free-range Jones farm on 5&20 in Bloomfield; Beef and chicken? Seven Bridges Farm on the Lima side of Factory Hollow is the BEST for us locals). But I don't want to talk about animal meat. I want to talk about human meat.

Lady Gaga's meat outfit at the MTV music awards was brilliant, I thought. I don't care for her music, but loved her absurd extreme.

In the exploitative, hyper-sexualized culture that MTV et al promote, every bit of push-em-up silicone, exposed lipo-ed thigh, and botulism-infected lip turns our screens into  butcher shop windows, so why not call it out quite literally? We hang our celebutantes on meat hooks and send them around the airwaves. We leer, stuff wads of cash in their g-strings, then throw them to the flash-popping, flesh-catching wolves. We sit back and shake our heads in judgment when the drinking-drug-sextape-insertscandaldujourhere inevitably breaks, complete with breathless back story, online video and falling-out-of-the-limo-curbside 8x10s.

Lindsay, Britney and Paris are just a few in the ever-lengthening line making their way across the butcher block. Who will sate our appetite tomorrow? It seems to me Miley and Katy Perry are well on their way there. As some of our young ladies and gentlemen emulate these flavor-of-the-month attitudes and actions, all the more reason to embrace Lady Gaga's outfit as cautionary:

BEING MEAT IS MURDER.

My undergrad degree is in broadcast communication.

I remember well my very first day of my very first broadcasting class, and the very first lesson from my very first communication professor. She shared the story of a small local newsroom in the southern US (if memory serves). A call came in one day from a man who planned to go to the town square, soak himself in gasoline and set himself on fire in protest (of what, I can't recall). 

A reporter and videographer went to the scene at the appointed time, and there was the man with his gas can. As the cameras rolled, he set himself on fire. Horrible.

The question was called to all of us media-wannabe neophytes: Were the reporter and videographer culpable in the mentally unstable protester's death? Had he set himself on fire because they were there?

I watched video yesterday of a Gainesville newspaper reporter being kicked off the property of that stupid church where they're threatening to burn the Koran (yes, I know the name of the stupid church and its stupid pastor, but they've gained more than enough publicity already). The intent of the video was to show how unfairly the church was treating one reporter because his paper had published an unflattering story, but I was taken with how many satellite trucks and eager observers were present. That first lesson from class at Brockport State came to mind.

Remove 24-7 HD coverage from the picture and one less bloated, self-important jackass can send shock waves around the world. Remove 24-7 HD coverage from the picture and the terrorists lose most of their sting. 

It is far past time for someone to report on the media's ever-expanding role in creating the news they then report.Depth and nuance are lost, but more and more air time is filled, nonetheless. Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd. Lately when I turn on the news, I feel like a rubber-necker at a car wreck. PRURIENT is the word that comes to mind (marked by or arousing an immoderate or unwholesome interest or desire). 

I have this fantasy that all of the reporters and satellite trucks will leave Gainesville before Saturday night, and that idiot pastor will find himself alone with the crickets when he steps out on the church lawn to build his shameful fire. (I have another fantasy that he'll start a grass fire that burns his church to the ground, but I try not to dwell on that one.)

There is no solution -- probably not even a cogent point -- to all of this. But all of those people who send in videos of family members getting whacked in the gonads, hoping to win $100,000? I think several of them are now news directors at cable news channels around the world.

The difference between that pastor and his namesake pictured above? One of them is perversely doing whatever it takes to gain attention. The other one is an excellent comedic actor.

Terry Jones as Brian's Mother

THIS Terry Jones is the one we should be listening to...