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Letter From New York November 7, 2010

November 8, 2010

Or, as it seems to me…

As I am writing this, I am journeying back down to the city after a very brief sojourn at the cottage, going back to the city to attend a farewell party for James Green, formerly CEO of several high tech companies, including Sabela Media, the company for which I was working when I moved to New York. James has emerged as a good friend and we have stayed in touch since the Sabela days.

Today he is about to embark upon an adventure he has been dreaming about since he was twelve years old. He and his wife have sold everything, purchased a lovely catamaran now named Ondine and are heading south to spend the winter sailing through the Caribbean before a spring Atlantic crossing to the Mediterranean where they will spend the summer. After that, who knows? Back to the Caribbean, out to Australia, back to work? But they are sailing away, the whole family, James and his wife, Emma Kate and their two children, Paloma and Ronan, who will most likely learn more while traveling than they ever could in school. Off to an adventure that almost everyone has dreamt about at one time or another – and an adventure they are going to live out. They’ll be gone for a year or two, vagabonds of the sea…

The Ondine, in port in the British Virgin Islands.

It’s probably a good time to be away. The Midterms have come and gone with the general consensus among my Democratic friends that it was not as bad as it could have been. Harry Reid might be despised by nearly everyone but was not so unpredictable as the loose cannon Sharon Angle, who struck me as simply unbelievable but less unbelievable than the Republican/Tea Party candidate in Delaware, Christine O’Donnell, she who once said she had frolicked on a Satanic altar, a statement that haunted her enough that she felt a need to take out ads that stated categorically she was not a witch, a decision she later regretted.

New York was spared the embarrassment of Paladino as Governor, a candidate that seemed to have a boundless ability to insert his foot in his mouth and to alienate nearly everyone while also leaving behind the impression, if not the fact, that his business dealings were suspect if not downright sleazy. Both Senatorial seats from New York remained in Democratic hands with Cuomo defeating Paladino for the Governorship. Locally, Democrats fared less well. Scott Murphy, the freshman Congressman from my district was voted out. The Republican State Senator, Steve Saland, defeated his Democratic rival, a disturbing result as Saland potentially crossed ethical lines in sending letters to volunteer fire departments demanding they support him publicly by directing members to vote for him and to have signs supporting him on fire department buildings in exchange for all the “help” he has achieved for them in the Legislature. This late breaking development in the race was disturbing to me and ensures that I will work to unseat him next election; he has crossed a line as far as I am concerned.

The entire race seemed to generate excitement only among the far right. The left was seemingly exhausted and unable to become enthused and motivated to work hard to fight back against the assault of the right. While Republicans claim a mandate, voter polls indicate that might well be a mistake. For example, in exit polls 47% of voters were in favor of maintaining or expanding health care reform while 48% were against it. Only 40% want the Bush Era tax cuts extended for everyone. 53% of voters have an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party while 52% have an unfavorable view of Republicans.

At the end of the day, the voters seemed to be saying – as it seems to me – that what is happening now is not good enough and something better is needed. What I fear is that as we seek that something better we might yield to the loud voices of demagogues rather than those of reason, seeking answers from leaders who promise easy solutions born out of undirected anger and pointed divisiveness.

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Letter From New York October 30, 2010

October 30, 2010

Or, as it seems to me…

The last week has been more than a bit business mad; Odyssey Networks has been doing a whole series of productions. I fell into the role of point person for them. We sent a man to Nigeria to shoot footage of the Imam and the Pastor, a Christian pastor and a Muslim Imam who have emerged from the religious warfare in that country as spokesmen for peace and interfaith hope. Pastor Wuye lost his hand in the violence, chopped off by a Muslim. It became the moment he moved beyond his hatred to embrace a different way. He and the Imam have become a team, founded a mediation center in Kaduna in Nigeria and have become world famous for their efforts.

They were honored on the 26th at the We Are Family Foundation Gala with the Mattie J. Stepanek Award. Mattie, if you recall, was the extraordinary boy who spent his brief life besieged by a rare form of muscular dystrophy, which killed him weeks shy of his fourteenth birthday. He wrote books on peace, became a national personage because of his presence on the Oprah Winfrey Show and was eulogized at his funeral by President Jimmy Carter, with whom he co-wrote a book. The Imam and the Pastor describe Mattie as a prophet, as he might well have been. Certainly his words echo beyond the time encapsulated by his short life.

I met them briefly at the Gala, introduced by Jonathan Smith, the producer whom we had sent to Nigeria to get the footage. There was a sense about them of peace and joy, calm in the center of a tumultuous world, a presence that was tranquil and slightly transcendental. It was an honor; it was a moment I won’t forget, two men, once sworn enemies, standing together now against the ravages of the violence that racks their land. Six months ago Christians and Muslims were killing each other in the Jos Valley, the place both call home. When they left New York, they were headed for Sudan where they had been asked to lead a Peace Conference in that country, which is edging toward potential violence as it advances toward a referendum that might split the country in two. If it goes that way, there is a chance war will break out and the land that is home to infamous Darfur will once again be racked by violence, the victims of which will mostly be the poor, the desperate, the defenseless.

Nigeria, the Sudan, the Middle East, Columbia, India, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan… The list of countries wracked by violence, war, revolution, counter-revolution, insurgency goes on and on. Do we think daily of lawless Somalia, home to modern pirates that regularly seize ships in the Gulf of Aden, holding them for ransom? No, probably not. But while we live our reasonably secure lives, vast parts of the globe are war zones or de facto war zones. Jonathan described the vast sea of tension and fear that swirls through the streets of Nigerian cities as no one knows when the next bout of sectarian violence will erupt, bringing more pain and death into their lives. It is not uncommon that Muslims and Christians will chop away fingers or hands [witness Pastor Wuye] to remind their victims of their hate. The streets are filled with the disfigured.

Against this tide of religious vitriol, individuals like the Pastor and the Imam work as best they can to bring sanity into the world in which they live, to bridge the hatred, roots of which are now forgotten but not relinquished.

Against this hatred are the words of a child, Mattie Stepanek, the actions of two men of God, who stand with other men of good that dot the world, seeking in some small way to change the world, to offer an alternative to the generations of killing. For if we do not find some alternative, we will never find a way out of the vortex, one that is now more dangerous than ever as religious divide, hatred and extremism fills men who have capacity to wreck global havoc.

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Letter From New York October 17, 2010

October 18, 2010

Or, as it seems to me…

Proceeding south on the train into the city, the Hudson River is framed by the fall foliage, slowly moving to a moment of colorful glory. The weather has changed; now constantly cool. Sweaters have come out of the closet and jackets are required. The northern hemisphere is moving languidly into winter.

Surrounded by this inspiring beauty, it is easy to think of the world as tranquil and peaceful. This makes for good reflecting time.

Last Thursday, the world focused on the rescue of the miners in Chile, pulled out through a narrow hole drilled through nearly half a mile of solid rock in a capsule that was designed with the help of NASA. I found myself going out to the television set in the common area every while or so to watch the progression of the rescue. It was difficult not to feel a rush of emotion, joy at their return to the surface from their particular version of Hades.

Their survival is an impressive and inspiring tale; people, companies, organizations, governments worked together to make this a reality while the world watched on television. All’s well that ends well, said the bard but between the beginning and the ending there were harrowing times for these men, trapped for over two weeks before being discovered – a swath of red paint they sprayed on the piercing drill the first indication that life remained below. Attached to the end of the drill bit were bits of notes to loved ones.

They had lived below in darkness and in fear, surviving on starvation rations of what little they had when originally trapped, terrified that they might descend to cannibalism. Out of this miasma of terror and fear, they organized themselves and became an example to the world of comradeship and fraternity. After contact, they asked for a statue of the Virgin Mary and other religious articles to organize a shrine in one part of their cave home. One man became the captain, another the spiritual leader, another became the medic, nicknamed Dr. House after the television character, popular in Chile as well as the United States.

Their entire adventure became very real to a global swath of people. A camera was lowered into their cavern and we saw glimpses of their world, met men in real time living a real drama. We saw them sweat, we saw them live and witnessed their conversations with their loved ones. We were not just on the surface watching passively, we were in the cave with them, getting to know them before we knew whether they would live or not. Rescue was not guaranteed.

Their story became a local story almost everywhere. Video provides a path to intimacy and with intimacy comes investment, caring and engagement. That’s what I felt when I watched the rescue, engaged in the lives of men faraway but close because I could see and hear and thus become part of their world.

Their story has been inspiring, their rescue a feat of technology and ingenuity. The whole tale reflects man at his best. Yet to be dealt with are the causes of the tale, the dangers in the mine that resulted in the cave-in. We will watch these men, now national celebrities in their homeland and will wonder about them as they move forward, back into life. One will have to deal with his wife and mistress both meeting each other in Camp Hope, the tent town that grew to contain the waiting and watching relatives. Another has been offered a contract on a Chilean television network. Senor Sepulveda captured the heart of a nation as he gave video tours of their underground world.

Video is becoming the lingua franca of the modern world. If a picture is worth a thousand words then a story told in video is more than a novel. Twenty years ago the story of the Chilean trapped miners would probably not have been an international sensation. Putting cameras into their dire circumstances changed all that. We got to know them before knowing the outcome. They were the real reality show.

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Letter From New York October 7, 2010

October 7, 2010

Or, as it seems to me…

All day rain spattered down on the cottage while I worked on some personal business that I have been neglecting, the last day of a five-day vacation I took from work.  It gave me time to ruminate about existence; nothing like a rainy day to get one’s mind soaring over the landscape of life, attempting to put the pieces of the puzzle together to tell the story.

I am fortunate to have people in my life that have chosen to linger it in it for a long time.  When I was in my first high school production, I met another classmate, Tom Fudali, as he was climbing up some scarily high scaffolding to adjust lights for the play.  He was wearing a tool belt and struck me as the kind of person who could do anything.  I was more than a bit intimidated.  But he became my best friend and I am fortunate that he is still my best friend; we’ve seen each other pass through many of the litmus tests life gives to people.  I am the godfather to his son from his first marriage; I was best man in his second wedding.  We can be together for a short time and it is as if no time has passed since we’ve seen each other.

He came this past weekend to visit and we went up to Lake George, a soul achingly beautiful 32-mile stretch of lake that anchored a significant piece of American history of which I was pretty much ignorant until I explored it this weekend.  At the southern end of Lake George is Fort William Henry, built to protect the northern edge of His Majesty’s American Empire from the French.  Thirty some miles to the north, the French build another fort, Carillon, to protect the southern edge of their North American Empire from the British.  And it was here that the French and Indian Wars were played out.  The French attack on Fort William Henry, its surrender and the subsequent slaughter of many of the British by the Indian allies of the French, became the inspiration for James Fennimore Cooper’s LAST OF THE MOHICANS, made into at least three films, the most recent being the lauded one starring Daniel Day Lewis.  Not a bad film though only loosely accurate as to facts in some cases.

Carillon, the French fort, was taken by the British not long after the fall of Fort William Henry and was renamed Fort Ticonderoga.  Later it played a part in the Revolutionary War.  Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold raced there after Lexington and Concord, taking the fort from the British garrison who had not yet heard that the Colonies were in rebellion.  The cannon from the fort were then dragged through the snow of the winter of 1776 to Boston, coming through my little town of Claverack on its way there.  Once the guns were set up outside of Boston, the British decided to retreat, sailing out of Boston harbor, threatening to burn the city if their retreat was molested.

I realized there was a great deal about American history that I didn’t know and certainly didn’t have a granular knowledge of it.  I didn’t know that Ticonderoga was once considered “the key to the continent” or that LAST OF THE MOHICANS was inspired by the events at Fort William Henry.

In the exhibitions, I realized how hard life was on the frontier and thought of the people who had carved this country out of a wilderness, of our strange history with Native Americans, allies, foes, oppressors, combatants, the uneasy relationship that happens when any Empire displaces another, which we did when we came here.  That is history.  We’re not unique.  It’s been happening since time began.

And since time began, history is formed and lived with relationships, friendships, loves, marriages, families, generations of folks who come and then are gone, moving into the slipstream of time while history continues to be made.  But our individual lives are punctuated by the friendships we make along the way, like the one I have with Tom.

 

 

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Letter From New York, September 25, 2010

September 25, 2010

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Letter From New York

September 23, 2010

Or, as it seems to me…

Fall is in the air; the leaves have begun changing on the trees that overhang my creek and litter my land.  Soon they will begin to fall and will literally litter my drive, unattended they are daunting and so weekends will begin to be devoted to clearing them away.  I both love and hate the fall.  I embrace the brisk wind and the wild tension between the encroaching winter and the summer that wants to linger, a autumnal ballet of seasonal forces, a lovely, painful dance as the world sinks into winter.

As that dance progresses, the world has been watching the tiny island of Manhattan for two events that occurred there, one following the other.  The first was glamorous – the all important, celebrity studded Fashion Week; the rich, the beautiful, the fashionistas, the models, the mavens all squirreled in and through the tents at Lincoln Center, all sponsored by Mercedes Benz.  The city could barely sustain the excitement of all this elegance, luxury and excitement; every morning the city woke to yet another display of fashion fabulousity.

The second event was the General Session of the United Nations.  World leaders gathered; Obama addressed the General Assembly, hoping to elicit the support of others in the world to buoy up the Mid-East Peace Process.  Every leader comes with an agenda, a shift they would like to see the world take in the way it sees their efforts on the world stage.  Thursday, President Ahmadinejad of Iran, took the podium and used his time to decry the United Nations, the United States, capitalism, Zionists, laud the wonders of nuclear power and declare that the majority of Americans think that 9/11 was orchestrated by the U.S. government.

Delegates from many nations walked out on him.  It was, as the United States spokesperson said:  predictable.  Ahmadinejad has used his annual trips to the UN General Assembly to further distance himself and his country from the rest of the world.  The scariest part of this scenario is that this man runs a country with an army, a pretty big army that has been testing missiles that seem to go farther each time they test them.  The saddest part of all of this is that the Presidency of Iran held by someone more rational could wield a huge influence for good in that desperate part of the world.  Iran is using its influence to stir up anti-Israel feelings all over the world and plays its hand on the world stage with a fistful of wild cards.  No wonder he makes the West crazy.  He hates the West.  Likes our toys, like nuclear power, but doesn’t like what we stand for…

Also in that part of the world is poor Pakistan, ravaged by floods, [have you donated anything to help Pakistan?] being torn apart by religious and political strife, the secular being clawed at by religious fundamentalists with a virtual civil war going on in the north west.  And, oh yes, they have a stockpile of nuclear weapons and they rattle that saber once in awhile.

When I think about these things, I feel great disquiet.  No wonder the fabulousity of Fashion Week is so attractive to so many – it diverts us from the fearsome realities that are just across town as the UN General Session met with frightening men like Ahmadinejad standing up there with all the other world leaders, completely free to rant against the organization hosting him and reminding us that he is running a country that is quite capable of the worst kind of mischief.

There is another Iran, the one that doesn’t want him and who marched in the streets in the spring but we saw what happened to them.  Who will ever forget the pictures of the young girl bleeding to death on the street, an event twittered around the globe.

It is fall, the season that precedes the long winter, a time when the mind roams to all the things that could go bump in the night.  And right now I hear a bump.

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Letter From New York, September 17, 2010

September 17, 2010

Or, as it seems to me…

On the anniversary of 9/11 I found myself at a baby shower, thrown by two of the conductors of the trains I ride for two of the passengers. Sixty people were there, forty-five of them from the train community. We laughed, we played games, had a couple of glasses of wine, watched the mothers receive gifts and visited among ourselves. The somber background of the day was not forgotten. On the radio in the morning there was the backdrop of the reading of the names, the remembrance of the gloriously, sweet, beautiful day that was 9/11/2001, a day that could not have been more beautiful, a day that was in perfect juxtaposition to the horror of the day.

At the party, people talked of it, the anniversary. Many commented that there were an unusual number of social events planned for the day. Several at the baby shower had more than one invitation to a social event and there was speculation that many people were holding special events that day because they wanted to leap over the pain of that day, to begin to imprint upon their brains some happier memories – and yet all felt a little a guilty about doing something pleasurable on 9/11. It is a somber day, a holy day in some ways, a day that may remain with us for always as a secular Good Friday, a day in which we will remember the terror that changed our world, forever.

And, at the same time, people are struggling to have life go on in this new reality, which includes terror and tension, fear and fright. Because on September 11, babies are born and folks pass from this earth, love needs to be celebrated and we have to come to terms with the great pain of 9/11 and the reality that the world continues on. Perhaps that’s why this year, more than in years past, there were parties on 9/11, because people are beginning to integrate the reality, the horror of 9/11 into the calendar of their lives.

It was the following day that I felt the spirit, the ethos of 9/11 more than I did on the day itself. I had to return to the city from the cottage early so that I could help with video coverage of a march organized by Religious Freedom USA. Founded by two young men, one a rabbinical student and the other an evangelical Christian, it has devoted itself to fighting intolerance of religious groups in America and right now their focus is on Muslims because they are the group receiving the brunt of intolerance right now.

The day started with speeches at St. Peter’s Catholic Church, around the corner from the proposed Cordoba Center, buildings united, said the pastor of St. Peter’s, by the fact that both were damaged by debris from the same plane hitting the World Trade Center. Josh Stanton, the Jewish half of the founding team, recalled the story told him by his still living grandmother who, as a child, found herself huddled in her home with her parents as a mob surged through the streets of lower Manhattan, ranting as they went, torches in hand, that it was time to kill the Jews.

He was organizing because he did not want a surging mob in the streets calling for the killing of Muslims. At the end of the speeches, there was a mile long march through the streets of lower Manhattan, through the rain, past places in the process of rebuilding, rebuilding from that terrible day that has shifted history. Walking with them brought all of that day back to me and brought back all the weeks following and all the horror, standing on a friend’s rooftop, staring down into the still smoking pit, a miasma of broken buildings and lives, smoldering weeks later, still spewing death.

But out of that horror, out of that smoldering cauldron, the resultant mix should not be hate and bigotry. We should have learned something from our mistake of putting Japanese Americans in camps during WWII, that not all members of a group are the same. My mother told me of our family attempting to downplay our German background during World War I [and II?] because of fear that people would think we were one with the ones we were fighting. Let us look at our history and learn from the mistakes made and do our best not to repeat them.

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Letter From New York September 8, 2010

September 9, 2010

Or, as it seems to me…

Saturday will be September 11th, the ninth anniversary of 9/11, a day that will not be forgotten by anyone sentient that day and this side of paradise. We, as a country, are indelibly marked by the events of that day.

A friend asked me what I thought I had learned from 9/11. How had the world changed? Were there any good things that had come of this?

Good, I wondered. Good? What good things could have come from that day?

I find myself staggered, still, by the acts of loving kindness I saw between people that day. There were two African American women who took an elderly Jewish man under their wing and commandeered the universe to see that he got where he was going. There was a bus driver who just did his best to keep everyone moving, moving away from Ground Zero. There was a woman who spoke Connecticut lockjaw but who took her time to take a man, not from her social class, under her wing and see that he got where he was going.

New York changed with 9/11. Already on its way to being a better city, it has become a much better city. The ranting for which New York was so well known has subdued. It began with the need for quiet following 9/11, when any loud noise sent tremors of fear through those who heard it.

One of my favorite stories following 9/11 was that of one of the trade unions here in New York. The man who had the coffee cart at the corner near their office was Muslim. Realizing he might be an object of vindictive behavior by fellow New Yorkers, the union set up guards to make sure he was not harassed, not troubled, not hurt. I weep when I tell that story.

What’s been positive about this?
For one, I know I need to understand and pay attention to one of the great religions of the world. Islam. Incredibly complicated and incredibly nuanced. Just like Christianity. I am beginning to learn the differences between Shia and Sunni and Sufi. The folks who are building the reviled Cordoba Center are apparently Sufis, who are reviled by Osama Bin Laden. Which demonstrates that Islam is not a united front. And if Osama Bin Laden reviles them, should we?

General Petraeus recently asked the group down in Florida that is planning on holding a Quran burning party not to do it because it will endanger troops. I yield to the Commander of the NATO forces in Afghanistan. If he tells me to stand down, I think I would. We need to think about the implications of actions. And to learn that is a good thing.

What I have learned has grown from the pain and suffering of 9/11, from breathing in the acrid smoky air of the city that day and the days that followed, from walking through streets, litter filled with debris blowing up from Ground Zero, from walking shell shocked through the empty, quiet streets of the busiest city in America. I was there. I walked it. I breathed that air. I smelt death in the streets; no amount of washing the sewers could completely cleanse that smell from where I was, two blocks north of the evacuation zone.

We have entered into a brutal age and unless we become clear about whom exactly we are fighting it will become an even more brutal age and that is not what we need. The Crusaders brought blind brutality to the Holy Land and we are still paying the price of that. What 9/11 has taught me is to acknowledge the huge work that needs to be done if we, the human race, are going to survive, to live in peace. And that is, at best, a distant golden goal when facing some who look to the past and not the future. To acknowledge that, to face that squarely, is a positive thing.

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Letter From New York September 3, 2010

September 3, 2010

Or, as it seems to me…

On Wednesday afternoon, I was sitting at my desk, plunging through the mountainous amounts of email that had collected while I had taken a few days off. I was attempting to decipher from a long string of messages whether or not we were about to send a team to Nigeria. Then a new email popped in from a colleague: Have you seen this?

It was a link to a breaking story posted by the Washington Post. A gunman had gone into Discovery Communications, potentially with explosives strapped to his chest, and had taken hostages. I immediately felt shocked. Once upon a time, I worked for Discovery and still have many, many friends there both from when I worked there and ones made in years when I was producing some programs for various of their networks. I am on the Board of CINE and my friend Rita Mullin, the current President, works for TLC, a Discovery Network. I know someone on every floor in that building, I would guess.

What I did next surprised me. I immediately left the Washington Post site and went to Twitter, put Discovery in the search bar and started scanning the posts, and long before it was announced on any news organization I had found out the gunman’s name was James Lee, that he had posted a rambling, bizarre, disturbing manifesto online about his grievances with Discovery and their programming. He, for example, wanted no more celebration of births on Discovery Health [soon to be the Oprah Winfrey Network] because children were, I think he said, vermin that consumed the earth. I found a picture of him entering the building, taken by a Discovery employee who sent it to another employee, who then tweeted it.

I found links to the video feed from the helicopter flying over the building. There were poignant messages from friends of people in the building wishing them well and saying prayers for them. I looked for tweets from people I knew but found none. I knew from Twitter that people had gotten out of the building safely before it was on the general news sites. Heck, I knew a lot about what was going on before I got my first email alert from CNN.

I learned, rather quickly, that the hostages were taken in the lobby area. That particularly engaged me and I became incredibly concerned. There is a wonderful woman named Rosa who mans the front desk in the lobby of Discovery. She is a magnificent human being who is the perfect first person for a visitor to meet. She is warm, she is respectful, she is organized and she is engaging. I have visited there for years and when I arrive she jumps up and comes out from behind her desk and gives me the biggest mama hug I get in my life these days.

The thought she might be a hostage caused me great distress. When I heard the hostages had been taken in the lobby, I thought of Rosa. A well of tears came to my eyes and I sat at my desk and prayed, prayed for all of them but particularly prayed for my Rosa, the woman who always makes me feel more than special when I arrive at Discovery. She doesn’t hug everyone who comes there. I have followed dignitaries into the Discovery lobby. I got hugged; they didn’t. I have been with important people who found themselves thinking I must be important because of the way Rosa greeted me.

To think she was a hostage tormented me. I rested when I found out that the hostages were all men, enormously relieved Rosa was not one of them. I breathed more freely when I found out, through Twitter, that the building had been successfully evacuated, that the children in the Day Care Center were safe at McDonald’s. I was grateful when it ended. Though it ended with the death of James Lee, a tormented soul who wanted to save the planet, a good thing, but who chose a desperately sick way of doing it.

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Letter From New York August 25, 2010

August 26, 2010

Or, as it seems to me…

Sitting down to write this evening, I find myself in a predicament – the most important thing that happened this week, which I find myself wanting to write about puts me in the middle of one of the great controversies of the moment.

This past Friday I was asked by Odyssey, my bread and butter client, to attend a meeting regarding the hugely controversial Cordoba House, the Muslim center proposed for a site two blocks from Ground Zero. Disturbed by the clamor that has arisen and the vitriol tossed about, Robert Chase, the head of a not for profit group called Intersections, which is an interfaith organization which is a member of the Odyssey family, called a meeting of other interfaith organizations to discuss the issue. And Odyssey was one of the invitees.

It was a small group, thirty or so that gathered Friday morning at the Intersections office on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. I was struck by the fact that half the attendees were from the Jewish community in New York and were among the most concerned about the tenor of the dialogue surrounding the Cordoba Center.

This is a controversy that has risen to national prominence over the last few weeks, inspiring some really hateful things being said about the individuals involved with the Cordoba Center. As I headed to the meeting I read the New York Post while on the subway, a conservative newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch. It is a tabloid and is as close as we get in the 21st Century to the “Yellow Journalism” of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. It is doing everything it can to swirl the Cordoba Center situation into a full-blown crisis of national proportions.

The Murdoch organization, owner also of Fox News, is doing all it can, it seems to me, to imitate William Randolph Hearst in its playing of the matter. [Don’t remember William Randolph Hearst? With his newspapers he probably single handedly stirred the country up to engage in the Spanish American War after the battleship Maine mysteriously sank in Havana’s harbor. Remember the Maine! was the battle cry and the U.S. got Cuba for awhile after that and the Philippines too – for about forty years until they became independent after WW II.]

This Cordoba “crisis” is a complicated thing. It’s been planned for years but only now has it become a cause celeb for Fox News and the rest of the Murdoch organization. Nine months ago they were pretty benign about it, treating it pretty much as a non-event until there was the smell of blood in the water.

One local politician is publicly calling Islam a “terrorist organization” which it isn’t. It’s a religion in which there are some pretty scary organizations that are terrorists. But not all Muslims are terrorists. Not all Christians are good. Some Christians do some pretty despicable things. Christianity and particularly my tradition, Catholicism, have done some pretty horrific things along history’s way.

Last Thursday I had a conversation with a young woman, a Hindu journalist pursuing a story in Pakistan on the dichotomy there between the secular and radical Islam, of how that country is being torn apart and that, as she sees it, Islam is being hijacked by radical elements that have arisen over the last thirty years, since about the time of the fall of the Shah. And these folks are really, really, really scary. I acknowledge that. I find them terrifying.

But that is not every Muslim. They are not my Muslim friends, who have endured hard things since 9/11. There are Muslims to be feared. But not every Muslim. There are Christians to be feared. But not every Christian. Have we so quickly forgotten that Timothy McVeigh, who committed the largest act of domestic terrorism prior to 9/11, was not a Muslim but from the Christian tradition?

The tarring of an entire religion with a label so powerful should give us cause to think hard, very hard.

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Letter From New York, August 17, 2010

August 17, 2010

Or, as it seems to me…

I usually do a draft of my letter on Saturday or Sunday, mull it over, play with the words and then send it out on Tuesday. This past Saturday morning I was awake early, it was another beautiful day at the cottage and I had an impressive list of errands to run. The day started with perusing the news online. I was creating some witty things in my head to write about Steve Slater, the world’s favorite flight attendant gone berserk. He was, after all, the story of the hour. The blogoshpere was atwitter. It was something one could not not comment upon.

I spoke briefly with Torrey Townsend, head of the small team Odyssey had down in Haiti covering the earthquake six months after. He sounded in fine fettle. Lucia, his associate producer, had been down for a day but had bounced back. They had good things planned for filming. All was going well.

In the sun blessed day, with perfect temperatures and that soft wind blowing, I ran my errands. While I was weeding in the center patch I missed the phone ringing. Later I noticed I had missed a call from Lucia and that a colleague, Eric, had left me a message. Torrey, in the few hours since I had spoken with him, had collapsed with a high fever, gastroenterological distress and was hallucinating.

The lazy, lovely Saturday I was enjoying was shattered and in a moment I was engaged in the process of extracting a team from Haiti, one of them very ill and the other two very worried and scared. Torrey was the team leader and with him down…

It took me back to a moment some years ago now when I helped Brent and Craig Renaud get an assignment from Discovery Times [the now gone, much lamented network] to go cover the Iraq war, embedded with the Arkansas National Guard, returning, eventually, with an award winning ten hours of programming that is one of the things I am proudest of having been involved with. The day they got on the plane to Iraq, were on their way, I broke down and sobbed. Jon Alpert, the great documentarian, was on the phone with me. He too was fighting tears. We had worked for months to fulfill their wish to do this job and when we had succeeded, it came down crushingly, we had just put two wonderful young men into harm’s way and their was no guarantee they would come back safely.

When we learned Torrey was ill, hallucinating in Haiti, on a Saturday when the normal office infrastructure was unavailable to support us, I filled in. I had to. I had sent him there and in his moment of distress, it became my job to organize our getting him and his team out. SOS Emergency got him booked on a flight out on Sunday. I secured the last two seats on that flight for his team, thanking God for credit cards, internet access and the intervention of God that I could get those seats. I did not want him alone, sick, on that plane. We got Lucia focused into getting some local doctors to provide some care, which they did and which, it turned out, turned the tide.

There was huge frustration because I wasn’t on the ground, getting things done. I was on the tenuous tether of AT&T cell service. Each step we took helped me feel I was doing what was my responsibility to this young man and his team. They had gone willingly, even joyously, to Haiti.

Several times as we moved Torrey and team out of Haiti and back to the states and through the hospital and to the good news that he was on the mend and that the drugs given by the Haitian doctors had been good choices, that as relief came, I found tears near the edge of my eyes, grateful, as I had been when the Renaud brothers returned unscathed, while pondering the bond sensed when lives intersect, even briefly, in some crisis.

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