March to a Different Drummer

Washington Irving imagined a Rip Van Winkle who fell asleep under a tree only to wake up twenty year later. Imagine for a moment that you fall asleep tonight and wake up on the morning after next year’s presidential election, November 5, 2008. Now, honestly, try and imagine how happy you would be if you picked up the morning paper on that day and read “[blank] WINS ELECTION”. Substitute the current candidates for [blank] and rank your level of happiness to the news. Be sure to NOT base your decision on what you think is the probability of that person winning, or on who you are currently supporting, but on how happy or unhappy you would be after being asleep from now until after the election and awake to the news. I took the test on myself and here are my results (on a +10, most happy, to a -10, most unhappy scale). And I was surprised at how this point of view helped me adjust my choice of whom I should really support. It is a bit like the concept of following your bliss. +9 Bar...

And I, holding my head in horror, cried: "Sweet Spirit, what souls are these who run through this black haze?" And he to me: "These are the nearly soulless whose lives concluded neither blame nor praise. They are mixed here with that despicable corps, of angels who were neither for God nor Satan, but only for themselves. Dante’s The Inferno, Canto III After living abroad almost ten years in both Saudi Arabia and in The Netherlands, one of the most upsetting and glaring aspects of American life I experienced on my return was the apathy and un-involvement of the average Americans I met. They seldom had the least interest in the governance of their community, scant interest in world affairs, and little sense that they, as individuals, could make a difference. This was utterly at odds with my experience living in middle class neighborhoods for years, both in Riyadh and in Amsterdam – two extremes of the liberal/conservative world. In both countries it was usual, not unusua...

The human race in 2007 stands at a crossroads, faced with the complexities of the political and cultural and technological realities accumulated over more than 4000 years of recorded history. And we are being hurtled into the shadows of an approaching unknown – un-experienced by our species and most likely pivotal to our species’ future. And perhaps the real and ultimate test of our religious and our spiritual strength. But constrained by the trappings and vested interests of established religion, there seems to be little promise. The pomposity, the religiosity, the arrogance, the hypocrisy that their intervention brings to our spiritual quest – all being human intervention, of oft well intentioned ecclesiastics – and often an obstacle to the universal human longing for connection with this universal and magnificent mystery we call by many names – and which is God to all. It’s time to see the Testaments and the Koran and the Pali Canon in context, to accept the inspiration of all ho...

Although I’ve been playing with computers and computer applications since an IBM 1620 was delivered for faculty and student use to the University of Richmond in 1964, I still am amazed at some of the things computers enable, and especially the values available on the Internet. One recent find I’d like to share with my readers, and I hope you find it as engaging as I did - follow this LINK .

I suggest anyone in Virginia go to www.cnn.com and search under “earmarks” and then under their representative in Congress and find out if they are sharing their earmark requests – if they are transparent on these requests – if they are willing to be accountable for the earmark requests they make. I live in Eric Cantor’s district - the seventh district in Virginia, and when asked by CNN to disclose his earmarks, the response was “no response”. Now Congressman Cantor is the fair-haired boy of the Republican Party, the lapdog of his party, and supposed representative of 700,000 Virginians, most who probably have never heard of him. But lobbyists have: “Representative Eric Cantor, a Virginia Republican famous on K Street for his annual fund-raising weekends in Beverly Hills and South Beach, has recently invited lobbyists to join him for some expensive cups of coffee. A $2,500 contribution from a lobbyist’s political action committee entitles the company’s lobbyist to join Mr. Cantor at a...

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results - Benjamin Franklin. The overriding dynamic in Chesterfield County, in my humble opinion, is clear but hardly recognized and seldom discussed. It is the continual white flight west ahead of non-white encroachment that lowers property values and reduces the attractiveness of the attendant school districts. Middle class whites move to protect their real estate equity and to insure that their children have the better educational opportunity. In the fifties and early sixties downtown Richmond, with its Thalhimers and Miller and Rhodes anchors, imploded, coincident and largely because of a poorly conceived busing solution to court required integration. Retail shopping in the county moved west to malls like Southside Plaza then further west to Clover Hill mall then further west to Chesterfield Towne Center. Anyone shopping at this mall today and noticing the increasing boarded up storefronts ...

It’s taken 400 years to get us here – I mean the Chesterfield County, Virginia and its 300,000 population that exists ostensibly as a bedroom community for the city of Richmond. I grew up here, went to high school here, and after a long absence have returned to the area – and I’m appalled. The first election I went to had not one Democrat on the ballot. Now I had been a small business owner, a long time business consultant to major companies, and for most of my life a Republican – but I found that local politics was still very much in the tight grasp of a few Republican good ole boys, hardly unchanged for decades. And that riled me to no end, as I am firm in my belief that a vigorous debate of ideas is essential to the evolution of a democratic society. Which brings me to last night’s meeting of the Chesterfield County Democratic Committee that featured four Democratic candidates vying for county office in this fall’s election. I add here that the county’s five supervisors and mos...