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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Letter From New York August 10, 2010

August 10, 2010

Or, as it seems to me…

The past weekend was one of indolence for me. Friday evening when I returned to the cottage, the air was clean and crisp, perfectly balanced in temperature. I threw open all the windows and allowed the air to flow through, a soft wind billowing in the scent of the woods and the creek from below the cottage. I watched a bit of television, read more of Sherlock Holmes, this time off the iPad, on loan from the office. I slept a deep, clear sleep, waking early and rolling over to once again surrender to Morpheus.

As sleep found me on Friday night, I determined to let the weekend be a small vacation. It had been a harried week. The mobile app had launched on Droid but we still wait for iPhone and Blackberry approval. There had been a meeting of channel editors, from all over the country, churning through ideas, one after another for the future. So when morning came on Saturday, a day stretched in front of me with no commitments other than the whim of the moment. I did a few things around the house, stopped at the dry cleaners on my way to town, picked up the weekend papers and settled in to a long leisurely brunch at the Red Dot, lingering in the lovely garden, warming in the sun, reading of the events of the world from which I felt far removed, safely, for a moment, insulated and protected.

It was an illusion, of course, but one I immersed myself in – for a moment wanting to be like friends who have ceased reading newspapers or scanning news websites or listening to anything but music on radio or net. I am not that person though and I found myself deep in the New York Times and my current edition of The Week, seeking some illumination in the words on paper, seeking to understand the ebb and flow of the violence that wracks the world we inhabit, seeking in that sun kissed garden the reason why one person would strap explosives on and then go detonate themselves in the middle of a crowd of strangers. Suicide is at least somewhat comprehensible, mass murder is not.

Deep out in the once pristine waters of the Gulf of Mexico, it appeared BP had staunched the leaking well. I swished flies away as I sat lazily on the teak bench on the patio, thinking about the rapacious need for oil that has resulted in our digging deeper and deeper in every accessible [and almost inaccessible] spot on earth to keep our machines rolling, wondering, lazily, why we have waited so long to seek alternatives? Perhaps because we are as lazy as I was Saturday afternoon, content to let things be than to expend energy to make changes? Do we, like the Louis XV, sit in our gardens and shrug, “Après moi, le deluge…”

And now that the well has been capped and it appears that ecological damage is less than feared, our collective media attention seems to be drifting away from the Gulf and on to…what? We wait to see what new events the digital throngs will next flock to follow, praising or bemoaning. On Saturday, I was only curious. There was nothing on the horizon that seemed the next frenzy in waiting. We have not excited ourselves about Pakistan’s floods or China’s landslides.

It seems the way we live, from frenzy to frenzy. But frenzy seemed far away this past bucolic weekend, devoted to laziness and indolence. From the Dot I wandered Warren Street, sat with friends in their shops and discussed the summer heat and the pleasant relief the day was giving. I lingered at Olde Hudson, the perfect place for cheeses, pastas, wonderful meats and fishes and took in the steady stream of shoppers, stocking up for a lovely summer evening and when I finally went home, I slipped between the cotton sheets and once again felt the soft summer embrace of my little world, far away, for the moment, from all the madness that makes the world so often threatening, preventing us, at times, from the lazy glory that is around us some of the time, at least.

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Letter From New York August 4, 2010

August 4, 2010

Or, as it seems to me…

As I write this, I am sitting outside, on the deck, overlooking Claverack Creek, sunlight glinting off water so clear the bottom of the creek is visible; cicadas thrum in the woods that surround the cottage, NPR plays on the radio, amusing and informing me.

There was no letter last week as on Sunday, when I sat down to write, I found myself locked out of my computer – turns out I needed a keyboard replacement, and so I found myself without my trusty laptop for a week while it was worked on. I discovered myself feeling very edgy, as if I were constantly searching for something I had lost. I write this in my time away from the office and in my time away from the office I did not have my trusty MacBook and found it difficult to work. So, late on Thursday, I was overjoyed when the laptop was returned to me in working condition. Now I have to plow through all the emails that have accumulated to see if there are any I might have missed as I was improvising in finding ways to answer them.

This unfortunate incident happened while I was weekending at the home of my friends, Joyce and Jeffrey, who summer on Martha’s Vineyard and had generously invited me to spend some time with them there. It was while I was languidly sitting on their veranda, soaking in the beauty of the water lapping on the boats at anchor in Edgartown harbor while listening to the coughing splutter of the launches puttering from boat to boat that this misfortune befell me and, at first, I felt it was a sign from the universe that I shut off work and continue my literary indulgence of reading Sherlock Holmes short stories, digestible bites of innocent intellectual satisfaction.

Returning to work, it was another story, certainly more painful and certainly revelatory in the degree of dependence I have upon my main digital device – deprivation from which was quite like, I suspect, being denied a necessary medication upon which one has become dependant for functioning. In other words, unpleasant.

While I was somewhat disconnected from the digital universe, the universe itself continued on…

Chelsea Clinton got married to her long time beau, Mark Mezvinsky, on Saturday in the lovely Hudson Valley hamlet of Rhinebeck, an event I noticed mostly because my Friday train home crawled out from Rhinecliff Station [Amtrak stop for Rhinebeck]. The train tracks apparently run directly along the edges of the estate where they were married and there was concern some luckless paparazzi would lose his or her footing while crawling on the embankments over the tracks and end up on them rather than above them.

Vastly more important than the Clinton wedding was the leak of tens of thousands of secret Afghan documents by Wikileaks.org, a website devoted to, well, leaks… From what I’ve cleaned, it is a site run by volunteers, 1200 around the world, and led by a man named Julian Assange, a former hacker out of Australia. They didn’t uncover the information; they simply published it. The actual whistleblower is suspected to be a 22-year old soldier who allegedly smuggled classified information out of his office disguised as Lady Gaga albums. He then provided them to Wikileaks and then Wikileaks made an alliance with the New York Times, the U.K.’s Guardian and Germany’s Der Spiegel and the rest is history…

Secretary Gates has questioned the morality of what they have done – names were named and it is possible, perhaps even highly likely, there will be reprisals. The leaked documents raise the question of whether or not the Pakistanis are working with us or against us. Apparently the documents can be read either way. The Administration points out, perhaps futilely, that the documents are all at least two years old, all 80,000 of them. What they do, it seems, is provide a history of the Afghan War, a long and bitter fight from which we are far from finished.

They are also a testament to the changes being wrought by the technology we utilize; thousands of documents can find their place in the sun with a single keystroke, igniting controversy and providing more information than we would have been able to obtain in another age, all because someone seemed to be using Lady Gaga for cover…

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Letter From New York, July 19, 2010

July 19, 2010

Or, as it seems to me…

Another week, another celebrity meltdown… This past week, we’ve been privileged to learn more about Mel Gibson’s private life than we ever wanted to know as his now ex-girlfriend released alleged tapes of his mad phone calls to her – so full of invective and threats and just plain craziness that most of America threw up their arms in disbelief. Sounding more like a love crazed teenager than a fifty something year old man, Gibson’s ranting so alienated people that his talent agency, William Morris Endeavor, dropped him from their list of clients. It is so bad that pundits have declared his career dead even as he finishes a film directed by Jodi Foster. I’ve never been a fan of Mr. Gibson’s; I do find this public descent painful to watch, embarrassing and sad though many feel he is only getting his just disserts.

There are thankfully signs of hope down in the Gulf of Mexico. The most recent cap on the leaking well seems to be holding though everyone is cautious. BP’s comments are very careful, in consideration of the number of gaffes it has produced in the months since the Deepwater Horizon caught fire and sank. Doug Suttles, BP COO, who when describing the apparent success of this cap, was so careful with his words that it was a bit hard to decipher the good news contained in them. If all continues to go well, the flow may stay contained all the way through the completion of the additional wells that are being drilled to seal the leak.

Against the good news, there was a scary story I found on Google News that sounded a bit like the conspiracy theory of the week – apparently the reason that both the government and BP are keeping the press so far away from everything to do with the oil spill is that they are concerned we will all find out that the real problem isn’t the leaking oil but all the methane that is building up. 55,000,000 years ago the planet Earth went through an extinction level event because of methane going boom! in the Gulf of Mexico area. Pretty much wiped out life on the planet as it was known then and this article was worried about a repeat. This is something I need to consult with my friend Howard Bloom on – he knows more than anyone else I know. More later, after I talk with him.

While the drilling continues into the earth to stop the Gulf Oil Spill from continuing, and while some are worried about the methane being disturbed by the drilling, the technology pundits keep turning attention on the elegant new iPhone 4 which has reception problems. There is an antenna fault and attempts to dismiss it as a software glitch haven’t gone down so well. Owners of iPhone 4 [I’m not, yet] are being given covers that mask the problem. Consumer Reports informs us that duct tape works as well – thank god for duct tape. Though this all seems “much ado about nothing.”

Last week we had Russian spies going back to Moscow; this week we have an Iranian defector un-defecting and going back to Tehran. He says the U.S. kidnapped him, but we deny that. Apparently he leaves behind $5 million we gave him for information. Certainly he is going to be facing lots of questions now that he is back at home and I suspect not all of them will be pleasant.

Elena Kagan will be coming up for confirmation this week. Argentina has become the 9th country to legalize gay marriage. George Steinbrenner, “The Boss” of the Yankees passed away after a colorful career as a team owner. More suicide attacks in Baghdad. Nelson Mandela celebrated his 92nd birthday. Louis Oosthuizen won the British Open. Busy week this past week, lots of news, good and bad.

Me? I enjoyed the fawn that crossed my path in Claverack this morning and the family of geese that waddled across the yard on their way down to the creek. I celebrate those moments while pondering the methane down in the Gulf…

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Letter From New York July 11 2010

July 11, 2010

Or, as it seems to me…

Who has been able to miss the endless replays of Lindsay Lohan breaking down in court as she was sentenced to three months of jail time plus three months of rehab? This train wreck has been happening for a time but only really broke through to my world when her sentencing became “breaking news,” causing me a moment of bemusement as certainly her sentencing to 90 days jail time didn’t strike me as “breaking news” worthy but, hey, I am not an editor trying to get ratings while living as we do in a celebrity fueled culture.

I suspect there is going to be some culture shock for the ten Russian spies –oh wait, excuse me, unregistered agents for a foreign government – who are now in Russia after a spy swap on the tarmac in Vienna in a scene worthy of a decent spy novel. Ten of theirs for four of ours. This has been going on for twelve days. New York tabloids have been smitten with one, Anna Chapman. Ready made for tabloid fodder, she is a beautiful red head looking as if she could have been cast as a Bond girl. With a taste for the high life, a fixation about bedding the sons of Princess Diana and an ex-husband who sold racy pictures of her to the papers as well as salacious stories of their sex life, she was front-page tabloid fare if ever there was. The NY Post trumpeted we should keep her when news of the swap leaked out. We didn’t; she’s in Moscow though I suspect we haven’t heard the last of her. She had “stardust” as far as the tabloids were concerned.

Both governments played the swap in a very low key fashion; relations are getting better between us and them; no one seemed in the mood to let a little old fashioned espionage get in the way of thawing the chilliness that had come during the Bush years. When looking at pictures of the American plane in Vienna I wondered who was Vision Airlines? Apparently an airline used by the U.S. for special trips like this – or for renditions, of which they have been suspected.

There are no suspicions about this being a dangerous world. Suicide bombers have been striking in Iraq and Pakistan. I found myself staring for a long time at a photo in the Financial Times of a father in Iraq carrying his dead infant son. It is a scene repeated too often in that part of the world.

The Gulf states are repeating a Day of Prayer this Sunday; it may be there is some good news in the offing. BP is starting a new effort to cap the well and if everything goes well this could actually contain the flow. I am sure nearly everyone will be praying that all goes well. The oil spill now covers an area about the size of Belgium. Oh, heck, Belgium is just a tiny country…

Not far from the real Belgium, new technology literally had its moment in the sun when the Solar Impulse, a plane powered entirely by the sun, flew for twenty-six hours over Switzerland, safely landing at dawn after having flown all night on stored energy. It is a glimmer of energy hope.

On the medical horizon there has also been a glimmer of hope; some advances have been announced this week in the search for an HIV vaccine, a disease that still ravages even as we have grown better at extending the life of its victims.

A friend of mine told me she no longer reads the papers because the news is so grim. Though grim it is, there are those glimmers that lift our hearts like the solar plane soaring or a small movement towards stopping a disease that has killed millions, including my friend Richard Easthouse, who I still miss and am haunted by the desecration the disease worked on his body.

So the news cycle clicks on; a mixture of good and bad, of things that give hope and provide despair.

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Letter From New York July 4, 2010

July 4, 2010

Or, as it seems to me…

Sometime during the Graduation Ceremony for the Hudson High School Class of 2010, I thought that everyone should attend a high school graduation once in awhile. The entire ceremony was an uplifting, enlightening moment in time, inspiring and hopeful, reminding me of some of the many good things that are happening in the world.

I was there was because I had been invited by Christopher Wollcott, a graduate of the 2010 class of Hudson High School. I have known Christopher since he was about ten years old. I first met him on a Saturday morning at my favorite bistro, the Red Dot. I was having brunch on a rainy day and Alana, the owner, had found he and his sister out wandering in the rain. She brought them in. They sat at a table and dried out. I don’t know whether that was the first time he was at the Dot but he has been pretty much a fixture around there ever since. He graduated from odd jobs to bus boy to waiter all the while guided by Alana, who took him under her personal wing. I love Alana, not the least for what she has done for Christopher.

He was a kid who might have not made it through high school. He could have been one of the ones who dropped out. Certainly, many of his friends didn’t make it all the way through. But Christopher did.

He eventually came with me on Saturday afternoons, helping me with errands, stacking wood, sorting things for me from business – a little of this, a lot of that and always cheerful company. As he grew, he developed into a responsible young man. He is special and has won the support of many a folk. Dini and Wendle, who own one of the town’s B&B’s, have had him work for them. Steve and Judi have helped him get the orthodontic work he needed. He is a loved person. And he loves back.

So it was with a great deal of emotion that I walked into the auditorium of Hudson High School. We stood for the Pledge of Allegiance and I found my heartstrings pulled. When the National Anthem was sung, tears came to my eyes. There were speeches by the Principal and the local State Assemblyman. The Principal called the Class of 2010 a special class, one of loving individuals. They seemed to be all of that. They made national news when they elected two gay boys the King and Queen of the Prom. There were no outraged protests from anyone, either at school or in the town. The Class was giving a nod to two of their own, with perhaps a wry wink.

The Valedictorian was a young man from Bangladesh who had arrived in Hudson at the beginning of his freshman year, unable to speak more than a few words of English. Hard work, very hard work, had propelled him to the top of his class. The Salutatorian was a young lady who thanked her family, all of them, from mother and father to step-mother and step-father, brothers, sisters, half-brothers, half-sisters.

The crowd stood and applauded as a high school diploma was granted to a Viet Nam vet who had never gotten one. There was a moment of silence when the parents of a student who had died during the year came to the stage to accept an honorarium from the Class of 2010.

The diplomas were given out. Several high-spirited young men moon danced their way back to their seats after picking up their diplomas. Cheers were given when the last diploma was handed out and the crowd, as one, stood to give a standing ovation to the Class of 2010, about to go on to the next phase of their lives.

It was altogether a fabulously moving experience, one that will resonate with me for a long time to come because it brought together so many good things: patriotism, love, generosity, caring, mourning, celebrating, exuberance all married together in one afternoon in America.

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Letter From New York June 27, 2010

June 27, 2010

Or, as it seems to me…

The huzz-a-buzz this past week has been almost all about the sacking of General Stanley McChrystal, who, if you somehow have missed this, said (as did a number of his staff) many uncomplimentary things about White House staff and some diplomats and said them while a reporter for Rolling Stone Magazine was taking notes – a supremely stupid thing for a very, very smart man to do. He was summoned back to Washington, arriving with his resignation in his pocket, which was accepted. He was replaced by David Petraeus; arguably the most respected military man in the country right now.

To my shock, an article in the New York Post actually praised the President for doing this. Now, for anyone who doesn’t know the New York Post, it is owned by News Corp which is run by Rupert Murdoch and is generally very, very, very critical of President Obama. As far as the Post is generally concerned, the President can’t sneeze correctly.

It has been the biggest military/civilian clash since Harry Truman sacked General MacArthur during the Korean War [which, by the way, started 60 years ago this past week] for criticizing the President to Congress. I kept wondering what McChrystal had been thinking when he allowed this to happen. From what I have read about the man, he is very smart, very tough, a very good commander – but this wasn’t a smart thing to do and, unfortunately, Obama felt he had no choice but to fire the General. What the pundits have said is that replacing McChrystal with Petraeus was brilliant and that out of this sad mess Obama has been looking more like a Commander in Chief than before – hence at least some praise from The New York Post.

While this was playing out, the Gulf Oil Spill continued to gush. Obama spoke from the Oval Office and at the end of his speech referenced the Blessing of the Fleet that happens in the Gulf Coast, praying that God will protect the fisherman about to embark. It was held again this year, not so long ago. Obama talked a bit about prayer at the end of his speech and the way it has been going, prayer may be the best bet we’ve got. It seems sometimes that it will take a miracle of some kind to turn this around.

I’ve been told by friends in religious occupations that some have seen the Gulf Coast Spill as the harbinger of the End Times. Though I think that any event can be and has been construed as a harbinger of The End Times. Seems to me that we have been in The End Times according to someone almost since the moment Christ ascended into heaven.

Though not really religious I do pray in my own ways and will extend the Gulf Coast and the eco-disaster there to the things I sent heavenward to my personal Higher Power. I will remember it more when I pause and speak to God. We might all do well to do that if we’re so inclined…

If there are religious/spiritual people at Google, I am sure they are sending their thanks up to heaven as a Judge in New York dismissed the billion dollar lawsuit that Viacom had filed against You Tube, a Google company, for posting hundreds of thousands of copyrighted clips. The Judge declared Google/You Tube covered by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and therefore not at fault. Now if you don’t know what the DMCA is all about basically, as I understand it, it says that if you’re a website like You Tube and someone posts copyrighted material to your site, you’re not liable for copyright infringement if you take it down as soon as you are alerted to it. Which the judge decided Google/You Tube had done and so it was in the clear. Viacom has announced it will appeal. However the Judge’s decision is powerfully important and is cause for great celebration in Googledom. As I said, I’m sure that those who pray are saying thank you to their Higher Power.

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