Category Archives: Favorite Posts

Tithing Myself
avatar

Posted on by
9

I was raised Christian. The religion didn’t stick, but a lot of the philosophy did: I believe that my purpose in life is to leave my corner of the world a better place than I found it; that I must treat others the way I wish to be treated; that the virtues which are worthy of my aspiration are faith, hope, charity, fortitude, justice, temperance, prudence, and the greatest of the virtues, love. I believe firmly that one person can make a difference, and that the way to make that difference is to live my beliefs. I believe in the husbandry of talents — in the admonition to take what I have been given and use it to the best of my ability and for good purposes. And I believe that I have a duty to tithe.

Being human, I fail more often than I succeed. And being non-Christian, I have no obvious method by which to tithe. Tithing, for those of you not raised Christian, is giving ten percent of what you have back to God. The usual form that tithing takes is money — Christians can give ten percent of their income to their church and be done with it. I won’t donate to churches, though, and distrust the way that charities use the money they get; I’m still seething about the Red Cross’s misuse of the millions upon millions of dollars that it received for the families of the Sept. 11th victims, and am endlessly disgusted by the revelations of charities paying for big corporate salaries and glossy advertising out of the money they receive from people who give it to them in trust and hope that they will use it well.

I’ve ended up being creative about my tithe. I took the admonition I received from Mercedes Lackey to “pay forward” and created this site and the Forward Motion community, passing on to those who have benefitted from either the request that they also pay forward. Some of my tithe was in the form of money — the money to run the site through its first years, cash donations to site members in trouble, buying new software that gave members more ways to learn and share what they had learned. Most of my tithe has been in time, though. Time is the most valuable thing any of us have, because it is irreplaceble and finite. I’ve used my time to write articles, teach classes, develop the community and participate in it, and offer the mistakes I’ve made as examples so that others can bypass those mistakes (to make brand-new, exciting mistakes of their own, which is always painful, but which is at least better than endlessly reinventing being run over by the wheel.)

I’ve tithed writing for a couple of reasons. Writing is what I’m best at — it’s my ‘talent’ in the Biblical parable sense, the thing that I have been able to make grow and bear fruit. So I have faith that if I was given that talent, it is a worthwhile and honorable talent to have. And that if it is worthwhile and honorable for me, it will be the same for others. I believe that helping others learn to make the most of their writing talent is therefore a worthwhile use of my life and my time and that by doing so, I am making the corner of the world that I am most suited to affect better.

This is a hard essay to write, because it’s more personal than I generally care to be. I don’t talk about what I believe much, considering faith to be a private matter better off left between me and God, and not something that is to be trotted out at every turn and waved like a flag. I expect a certain amount of derision for this statement of faith, such as it is. Statements of faith are pretty unpopular right at the moment. But in a society that more and more encourages throwing money at all the world’s problems instead of finding creative ways to solve them, and that does everything it can to hide the fact that money so thrown is rarely used well, it seems to me that the non-religious tithe of one’s talent and time can become a form of quiet activism, a way of taking on a single problem and taking personal responsibilty for the process of solving it. Not all problems are huge. Not all of us have what it takes to fight the big injustices, the big crimes, the big battles. My little thing here isn’t going to save the world, and I know that, and acknowledged to myself some time back that — great dreams aside — I wasn’t designed for world-saving. I don’t have the talents or the drive to be good at that. But all of us are very good at something, and anything done well and with love and the goal of making things better is a step in the right direction.

If you are someone who has despaired at the state of the world and wondered how you might make a difference, I thought I could offer a personal tithe as a possible alternative to being a wealthy philanthropist, or a full-time crusader. Or endlessly sending off checks to places that aren’t accountable to you and don’t want to be. And I figured if I suggested it, you deserved to know where I was coming from, and what I’ve done to put my money, and my life, where my mouth is.

The Muppet Employment Line
avatar

Posted on by
20

Time for weighty matters. We were discussing this over breakfast this morning, and just barely scratched the surface. Which Muppets would you hire, if you were hiring? We like Kermit for management — stable, rational, has a bit of work experience under his belt already (that news thing he does). Miss Piggy looks like a lawsuit in the making, either suing (bogus sexual harassment) or being sued (genuine assault and battery); Bert seems okay for an employee — but not management. We wouldn’t touch Ernie with a ten-foot monster — way too flaky and he’d always be pulling practical jokes and causing workplace injuries. Cookie Monster seems okay in most non-food, non-customer-relations work. He thinks Big Bird would be okay, I have the Yellow Nightmare pegged as a closet serial killer.

You say?

Why Do You Blog?
avatar

Posted on by
22

I’ve been asking myself this question, have come up with a couple of good answers, I think, and would like to hear your answers, too. If you don’t have your own weblog, you can answer the related question, “Why do you read other people’s blogs?”

I like to talk to people. When I was a kid, my idea of a party was to have a handful of friends over to sit in front of the fireplace and eat pizza and talk. In this regard, I haven’t changed at all. I like to discuss interesting things, things that people are excited about or passionate about, things that we see differently. I like to toss my ideas out there and bounce them off of other people to see how the ideas hold up. But I am a stay-at-home mom and a full time writer and I don’t get out much. I see my family every day. And other people occasionally. And other people that I can sit down and talk to about interesting things for hours at a time … maybe a couple of times a year.

For me, this weblog is my pizza party, sans pizza. (Sorry about that.) I’m always interested in writing, so that’s a constant topic. But it isn’t just a writing blog. I’m interested in and frequently worried by politics, so that goes in there. Some bits of my life — homeschooling, for example — occasionally go into the mix, as well as occasional shocking revelations like the fact that I’m actually middle-aged. (If you haven’t hit this one yet, believe me — it’s shocking when you get there.)

But as much as I like to talk and discuss, I don’t like to fight. I don’t enjoy reading flames, I don’t enjoy being furious, and I don’t like trolls. So I’ve set things up here so that those are things I don’t have to deal with. I’m here to have fun, to think, to toss out things that make other people think, to talk.

I know some people talk to people all day in unpleasant situations, and come home in a foul mood, and really want to blow off tensions they accumulated at work — and flaming people on the internet is a great way to do that. I know some people who simply like to fight. And some who enjoy causing trouble. They’re using the internet with different goals than mine, and while clearly they’re welcome to use it as they wish, when they’re in my space we’re not going to work out. And since it is my space, and since I know what I want to have here, I have no compunctions about kicking them out. After all, the internet is huge, and people who are looking for trouble can find what they’re looking for elsewhere. Whereas the only place that I can create the interesting ongoing all-subjects conversation I’m looking for is right here.

The interactivity of the weblog is its key feature for me. I blog because I like to talk to people, and at this point in my life, you’re the folks I’m talking to. If you imagine yourself in a long, low-ceilinged converted porch with a fireplace at one end, with the air a bit chilly and snow on the ground outside and the fire roaring, with very good pizza flowing in a constant stream, and with a lot of other interesting people sitting around talking to each other, you’ll have the atmosphere.

That’s what I’m looking for, and why I blog. How about you?

“I’m getting history on the carpet”
avatar

Posted on by
Reply

The kidlet and I discovered something wonderful today (and I owe Sheila Kelly a huge thanks for this, since she gave a link for a paleontology kit in her weblog).

We picked up an archeology kit from Scholastic the last time we were at Toys ‘R Us — it’s called “Mysteries of Egypt” and it comes with a five-or-six pound compressed stone pyramid, hammer, chisel, paints and brushes, safety glasses, and booklet with some nice starter information on the history of Egypt and the work of archeologists. My son and I had done some previous reading on Egypt. I read him the history in the booklet, and he knew a fair amount from our previous reading. So I showed my little guy, who is five, how to hold the chisel and the hammer and turned him loose. He knew there were artifacts in there.

He worked for a good fifteen minutes before he got the first inkling of where one might be. It took him another three hours to free the first two artifacts — a small Sphinx and a hieroglyphic tablet.

In the meantime, while he worked with amazing intensity and excitement, we talked about the history of ancient Egypt, the work of archeologists, science, how things get buried over time, and a bunch of other goodies. We’re good for at least six more hours of digging over the next couple of days, I had to peel him away from the pyramid when it was time to go do other things, and he has fallen in love with archeology.

We did art, writing, science, math, history, spelling, and geography (measuring the artifacts, cataloging his dig, filling out a site survey in our best attempt at proper format, drawing the uncovered artifacts, finding Egypt, and so on) and we had three lovely hours together while I watched him uncover something thrilling. This is what education should be.

And he gave me the best line I’ve had in days; with little bits of stone flying everywhere as he worked, he told me, “Mom, I’m getting history on the carpet.”

Taking Back Feminism
avatar

Posted on by
32

I identified myself very firmly as a feminist once upon a time. I was in sixth grade, the time was the early 1970′s, and I could see what feminism was accomplishing for women, and I could see myself fighting that fight.

That was, of course, before NOW, the National Organization of Wackos, lost all sight of what feminism is and decided it was a platform for defending and even lauding child murderers like Andrea Yates, pushing an anti-male agenda in favor of female separatism and endless wails of ‘down with patriarchy’, and cheering deadly cults like Falun Gong which encourages women and children to immolate themselves in protest of repression, and which has been responsible for mass suicides and family murders.

Feminism, real feminism, is about women sharing the world with men, being equal partners with men, having equal rights and receiving equal pay for equal work. And that’s pretty much it. It does not denigrate motherhood in favor of careerism — it supports choices. It does not encourage lesbianism while claiming that women who choose male lifemates are traitors to the cause. It supports choices. It sure as shit doesn’t claim that women like Andrea Yates are cautionary tales for all women who are mothers, one of those ‘there but for the grace of God go I’ examples of how risky motherhood is to your sanity, as if having kids damaged your brain, destroyed your capacity to judge right from wrong, and might just turn you into a murderer in spite of yourself; real feminism never portrayed murderers as victims, and never encouraged anyone to look at women as weak, helpless slaves to their hormones.

I’ve had enough. I say it’s time we — the sane women of America and the men who love us — reclaim feminism from the lunatics who are currently tarnishing it. I say we stand up and say to NOW, “Your vision of feminism has nothing to do with what most American women believe or want. We don’t want to live in a world without men, we don’t want to live in a world with men in subjugation, and we don’t want to live in a world where idiots like you are trying to destroy all the gains we’ve made by claiming we’re too weak and fragile and helpless to make intelligent decisions or to take responsibility for our actions. WE ARE NOT VICTIMS. We are women, and we can stand on our own two feet, and take our knocks, and keep right on going. All we want is an equal (not preferential, just equal, thank you) hand in the poker game with a clean deck of cards. We’ll take it from there.”

Care to join me?

The Things That Break
avatar

Posted on by
15

Do you remember the Twilight Mom Yodel? I do. It was when the neighborhood moms realized they could see fireflies outside the windows, and their heads popped out the back doors all up and down the street, and in voices that echoed into the hills and back, they shouted in more or less unison, “Baaaaaarbara!” and “Liiiiiiiiiiissa!” and “Joooooohn!” and “Tiiiiimothy!”, followed by “Time to come hooooooooome!”

Do you remember the significance of the noon whistle? I do. It was when the local plant (in our case, Alcoa) shut down for an hour so the guys could go home and sit down to lunch with their wives and kids. Banks closed at the noon whistle, and so did some stores, and the kids who were playing in the back yards together went rocketing back to their own homes because it was time for chicken noodle soup and peanut butter sandwiches and an opportunity to listen to your parents talking about their lives.

You can take this as Charles Dickens’ “best of times, worst of times” — we were already deeply embedded in Vietnam; a majority of the population believed what the government was telling everyone; we had J. Edgar Hoover in the FBI and Lyndon B. Johnson in the White House and the Cold War in full swing and McCarthyism echoing in the voice of Barry Goldwater; the odds of a woman who didn’t want to be a homemaker getting a good job were only slightly better than the odds of the chicken she was roasting standing up and whistling “Dixie”; and many women still went to college to get their MRS degree and then vanished thereafter into the land of Mrs. John Doe-dom, never to write their own last names, or even first names, again.

Girls knelt in the school corridors while teachers measured the distance from their hemlines to the floor, boys were sent home if the hair on the back of their necks touched their collars, and racism (as deeply entrenched as sexism) was still so pervasive in some places that people not only hadn’t really thought of it, but they hadn’t really heard of it.

There was much about those years that was bad, corrupt, cruel, much that was truly wrong, much that needed fixing.

But kids weren’t walking into high schools and shooting teachers and classmates, either. They were not, for the most part, being raised by strangers. Community schools chose their own books and their own curriculums and graduated students who could read and write, add and subtract, and who knew at least the high points of their own nation’s history. Those same kids weren’t going home with a key around their necks to let themselves in, fix themselves a snack, lock the door tight behind them and not answer for anybody because they were the only ones there. There WERE neighborhoods, and neighbors, and if your mom had to go out for a minute the woman next door was home and you knew to go over there because you knew the woman next door, and her husband, and their kids.

Neighborhoods are gone, and the Twilight Mom Yodel is gone, and Lunch At Noon is gone. And those were good things. Real, solid things.

And I don’t think we can bring them back. Not even for those who want them, not even for most of the women and men who realize that raising children to be decent human beings is the most important thing any human being can do. The world changed, and it did so by sacrificing families and the needs of kids on the alter of personal freedom and self-actualization for adults. It sacrificed men and the jobs men did to take care of their families, and the honor men got for providing for their families, in favor of “we’re all the same.” It sacrificed women who cherished staying home with their children and raising families. Women’s liberation was supposed to be about the right to equal work for equal pay. The right to pursue careers. But not the obligation to, at the expense of the lives of our kids. Staying home to raise and teach their children is no longer an option for most women, and that’s wrong. The brave new world sacrificed jobs that pay enough to allow one person to provide for a family and replaced them with jobs that nearly all families in the middle and lower classes must have two of simply to survive.

And no matter what the government sociologists say about day-care being good enough, about more hours being spent in school and before-school programs and after-school programs not being harmful, kids aren’t as capable as they were, they know less, they are as a whole more prone to violence and drug use and sexual experimentation at earlier ages and suicide and self-destruction all along the line. Kids raised by institutions don’t have the experience of watching parents be good parents, either — and the institutions will always be there to raise their kids, raising the likelihood that children who were institutionalized from an early age will institutionalize their own children.

There are things about the world that are better today than they were in 1966, but what we as a nation and as a civilization do with our children is not one of those things.

The possibility that T.S. Eliot might have been right is never too far from my mind. He said:


This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

I heard that whimper when my tiny daughter turned when I left her in day care and raised her arms to me and begged me not to leave her — when I listened to experts who insisted that she would do just as well with strangers as with me. I lost her for years, and got her back at last when she homeschooled high school. But nothing, nothing, could replace the years we lost, and now she is grown, out on her own, and I resent every day the state stole from me, and every hour I stole from myself, and I resent the liars who say, “Go take care of yourself first; as long as you’re happy your kids will be fine.” I resent being stupid enough or gullible enough to believe that. I have another chance with my youngest. I don’t intend to waste it.

We’ve broken something that I don’t think we can fix. We’ve broken it so badly that most people can’t even look at the pieces lying on the ground and guess what those pieces used to be, or how they once fit together. I can’t see the consequences far down the road, and neither can anyone else. But I can see the results so far, and the results so far are bad.

Families and neighborhoods should not have been the things we let break and left lying on the ground. They were the best things we had.

Tough scene to write
avatar

Posted on by
Reply

Talyn walked into trouble today, eyes wide open. Writing the scene was tough — I’ve never put myself in quite as self-destructive a spot as she is in right at the moment, but chronicling her actions and feelings and thoughts as she does something that she knows is wrong even as she’d doing it really churned up memories of my own that I could have gladly left buried in the bottom of the muck for the rest of forever.

And it made me think about what you have to go through to get a good story. Writing funny stuff is never easy — humor is basically all the pain and screw-ups of your life put on public display with a twist that startles. Writing romantic bits always feels risky, because you know that no matter how careful you are to write the story about other people, some of you is going to sneak in, and there are some things about yourself you’d rather not have hanging out on the laundry line with the T-shirts and the jeans, where everyone can see them. Writing bad things happening to characters you care about is brutal, because you do care, and you tend to identify what is happening with them in a ‘what if’ sense — ‘What if this happened to me, or to the people I love?’

But writing about characters making bad decisions when those characters know what they’re doing even as they’re going ahead with it is sort of like watching the train-wreck portions of your own life in excruciating slow motion. You cannot help but identify with your character, cannot help but feel the acid in your stomach and the ache in your muscles that comes from being pulled in two directions at the same time by the memories of past bad choices, cannot help but want to turn away so you don’t have to watch what happens next, or maybe to cheat a little and soften the blow so that it doesn’t turn out as bad as it could, or even let the character experience a last minute change of heart that will save her from the awfulness you know (and they suspect) is coming.

Perhaps not everyone has done something stupid knowing the whole time that it was a bad, bad idea, but drawn on by the sort of bone-deep want that permits you to push common sense out of the way and do it in spite of yourself. But I’ll bet a lot of us have. And I’ll bet the scene I got today — and the next few Talyn scenes I write — will be as uncomfortable for y’all to read as they were for me to write.

The Writer vs. The Story
avatar

Posted on by
12

Got my 2000 words, though I ended up having to work pretty late tonight to get them. While I was writing, I was thinking about the discussion of diacritical marks and ‘conlangs’ that we were having a couple of days earlier.

Here was the comment that I was most thinking about: “Just a comment on this: I don’t think diacritics should be viewed as artwork at all. They are the only way (besides the IPA) to represent many non-Western sounds in the Roman alphabet. If one goes beyond the pastiche level of conlanging, and works out phonologies that are interestingly different from English, they become absolutely necessary.”

While the writer of this comment is absolutely correct about the value of diacritical marks in developing complex conlangs dissimilar to English, there’s a point that needs to be brought forward.

There comes a time when the writer starts working against his own story. A point where the worldbuilding and the development get in the way of the tale.

I like conlangs. I love language development. I’ve been a fan of words since I realized at about the age of eight or nine that dictionaries were a lot of fun to read; that they told stories of words that had started out as other words in other languages and other times. I have built a few very nice languages, and developed a couple of them to the point that I could actually write in them and speak in them — this is one of those geek confessions that I probably shouldn’t make except in the company of other language geeks, but what the hell. Mine were heavily inflected languages with some wildly non-English grammatical and pronunciation conventions, and letter combinations that would be about as cruel to the average English-speaker as English multi-consonant combos are to many non-English speakers.

I put so much work into those languages that I wanted to use them in the stories for which I’d developed them. I wanted to use them a lot. After all, developing a language is a hell of a lot of work, and I had a lot of language there to use, and it seemed awful to waste it. I loved doing all that language work, and I loved putting it into the story.

But I discovered that the story did not benefit from my careful language-development, or from the large passages of language that I tossed in and then casually translated. I ended up having to rip out almost every bit of the conlang material because it was boring, difficult, and had the effect on the story pace of a tire iron suddenly jammed through the spokes of a bicycle racing downhill. The results weren’t pretty.

I have had these hideous pile-ups over other things that were more me and less my story — attempts to shoehorn lots of details of cultures and religions that lived as the result of huge worldbuilding orgies into a story that didn’t need them, wild tries at dragging my characters to ALL the places on my map because all those places had such cool things in them ….

It comes down to this. Yes, you the writer can build a great language, or a great world, or a great culture, but none of these things is the story, and if you focus on the needs of your worldbuilding over the needs of your story — insisting, for example, on using odd diacritical marks that force the reader to pronounce the word your way even if he has to stop and figure out how �bv�rti would be different than �bviert�, or send the reader digging for a dictionary to even take a shot at what the hell you’re getting at, then you’re doing your story a disservice at the expense of yourself.

The writer and the story are natural enemies sometimes, wanting mutually exclusive things. The writer’s interests and hobbies and fascinations are useful in small degrees, but at some point they have to take a back seat to the needs of the story. Because if you hope to write, you are eventually going to have to throw the fight so the story can win.

Carlin, OSHA, Class Guilt, Vonnegut, and the Lowest Common Denominator
avatar

Posted on by
28

The job of any good comedian is to kick your head out of your ass. To throw the parts of life that make you uncomfortable in your face in a way that shocks you, makes you laugh, and makes you think. People in general go through life tucked under the warm, dark blanket of their assumptions and beliefs, eyes squeezed tightly shut, ears plugged against anything that might disturb their slumber; comedians are the guys who lift the covers and douse the sleeper in icewater, and shout, “Hey, wake up! You’re missing this!”

George Carlin is one of the best there is with the bucket of icewater. He’s fearless. He’s quick and smart. Mostly he’s dead on, but even when he’s wrong, he leaves you thinking about why he’s wrong.

On his newest CD, taken, I guess, from his most recent HBO special, he does this bit on the US exploration of Mars. He’s against it. He’s very funny in presenting his reasons, but his reasons boil down to: We could use all that money to feed poor people; and, We aren’t worthy to take our culture out into the universe because we still have wife-beaters and child-molesters and McDonald’s and cultures that forcibly remove the clitorises of women so they won’t enjoy sex and any real civilization would be appalled to see us coming.

We’re not going to get into the “feed the poor people” argument here. Okay? It’s one of Carlin’s last gasps of Liberal Economoronics, and if he thinks about it he knows better, and if you happen to agree with him but you think about it, you’ll realize that you know better, too. If you want a laugh, follow the path of this search I did on Google — “use the money to feed the”/“use that money to feed the”. If you can’t figure out why “use that money to feed the … whatever” is a seriously stupid concept, e-mail me and I’ll post your e-mail (anonymously, if you prefer) and whichever others I get in a separate column, and then I will SHOW you.

But not today.

Today we’re hunting bigger game. We’re going after the Burden of the Lowest Common Denominator, and the first peg in the BotLCD is the “We’re not worthy” argument. And that argument goes like this: We’re not worthy to go into space, build new skyscrapers, celebrate our own culture and our own lives because vast portions of this planet are political, economic, or human-rights shitholes. Frequently all three at once. We’re not worthy because our own culture is materialistic, and full of stupid people. We’re not worthy because we have stressed the ‘wrong values’.

That’s Point One. Hang onto it. “We’re Not Worthy.”

Here’s Point Two.

I was watching a documentary on the building of the St. Louis Arch the other day — a fascinating story about a magnificent achievement that developed new construction techniques, created an architectural triumph, and stands today as a symbol of daring and creativity. And one of the men talking about the building of the Arch mentioned that the insurance company underwriting the building of the Arch had predicted X number of deaths during construction, but that no one had died. And then he added this chilling little throwaway line — “Because of OSHA regulations, something like this probably couldn’t be built today.”

OSHA, for those of you who have never had to prep for an ISO inspection, is the Occupational Safety & Health Administration, a US government organization whose mandate is to ensure a safe and healthful work environment. OSHA is the enforcer of hardhats, safety harnesses, non-lethal cleaning and disinfecting supplies, dirty needle disposal, handwashing technique, and a whole lot of other important stuff. Like most government agencies, it is humorless, unimaginative, and more than all other government agencies combined, it is dedicated to the creation of Life Without Risk. It and insurance companies walk in lockstep to prevent people from doing things that will hurt others, but also to prevent them from doing things that will hurt themselves. That second bit — barring people from choosing their own risks — is a Bad Thing. But it’s important to those who would have us bear the Burden of the Lowest Common Denominator.

So along with “We’re Not Worthy,” hold “Life Without Risk” in your head.

Point Three. Whiteness Studies FredOnEverything has an intelligent overview of Whiteness Studies but the main point is that, if you’re white, you’re supposed to feel guilty for what your race has achieved, cumulatively, over the past couple thousand years. I haven’t heard anyone suggest that I’m supposed to feel guilty for my guys stripping naked and painting themselves blue and taking heads in battle to stick over their door frames way back when, so I’m guessing it’s only when we started developing interesting technological and scientific and literary and artistic achievements that we became Evil Oppressors.

Whiteness Studies is just the newest offshoot of the mindset that claims that the playing field should be level. That everyone should have the same stuff, be treated in the same way, be allowed to do the same things. That everyone who runs the race should get a fucking ribbon. Yeah, my kids went to one of those schools too, for a while.

So now we have “We’re Not Worthy.” “Life Without Risk.” “Level the Playing Field.”

There’s our triad of the Burden of the Lowest Common Denominator. That everything should be fair, that everything should be safe, and that until everything is safe and sane and equal for everyone, no one should do more than anyone else does. No one should go into space until fuckheads stop whacking the clitorises off of their baby daughters so that when they grow up, some other fuckhead won’t have to worry about them cheating on him because he sucks in bed. No one should build a mansion because not everyone can have mansions. No one should build another St. Louis Arch because building it wouldn’t be safe and who cares if it’s glorious.

Kurt Vonnegut once wrote a story titled “Harrison Bergeron” about a world in which everyone was handicapped. Where those who were not born with handicaps had them artificially applied. Weights and chains for the fast and graceful, distorting glasses for the keen-sighted, disruptive noises to keep the brilliant from thinking too long about any one thing. Two talented beautiful people stripped off their shackles and their blinders and danced, and they flew, and for a few moments they were wonderful and glorious and they created something magnificent. And then the envious who remained bound to the ground killed them. We’re inching toward Kurt’s nightmare, and some days, we’re running.

Guess what. The world is not fair. People are not equal, except (in some places) in the eyes of the law. The poor are always going to be with us — NOTHING is going to remove poverty from the face of the earth. Stupidity is going to be here, too. Stupid people have kids just like smart people. Envy is here to stay, and so is ignorance, and evil, and disease, and criminality. There is no fix for the whole entire world, and in all likelihood there never will be. Neither is there any all-encompassing WE that brings everyone into the flock and makes them all the same, nor should there be.

So do those of us who are willing to take risks, who can achieve, who have access to education and intelligence and the courage to use them embrace the Burden of the Lowest Common Denominator? Do we crawl into a hovel with no water and no sewer and no electric and sit rocking back and forth, beating our breasts and tearing our hair because we feel bad that we dare to dream of better things when others can’t or won’t?

Do we choose degradation and mediocrity and filth and guilt? If we do, then nothing will ever get better for anyone, anywhere. It is not the breast-beaters and the hair-tearers that make good things happen.

If we do not dream, then no one will dream. If we do not soar, then no one will soar.

No one will have to feel bad about himself either, of course, because everything will be shit, and that’s what some folks want. To share the pain, because they can’t or won’t pursue anything better.

Or do those of us who can dream, and reach to the stars, those of us who are willing to take the risks in order to achieve — do we go ahead, and do worthwhile things now because now is when we have? Do we, regardless of our own race or creed, or anyone else’s, step up and do, and in doing hope that we can inspire a few others who, without our example, might not have dared?

I dare to dream. I dare to achieve. I hope you will, too.