Posts Tagged ‘Isis’

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Letter From New York 02 03 15 A Step Too Far…

February 3, 2015

The day didn’t start quietly; I was awakened by the sounds of trucks scraping the street outside the apartment in New York. It was a struggle to wake, having been in a long, convoluted dream about explaining some technology to a friend.

Running late for an early lunch date with a friend, I hailed a taxi on West End Avenue and headed for Le Bonne Soupe in Midtown. The driver was a cheery fellow and we chatted as we headed south; he was from Lebanon and has lived in the US for twenty-six years. He left Lebanon in the late eighties due to the civil war between Christians and Muslims. As his taxi was decorated with a number of rosaries, I pegged him as Christian. He reminded me that I have made a decision to live in an attitude of gratitude these days.

My friend, Mary Dickey, and I were the first customers of the day at Le Bonne Soupe, settling in for some warm food on a cold day. While we were eating, my phone buzzed with the distinct sound it has when an alert is coming in from BBC News. Picking up the phone, I read that ISIS had apparently burnt alive their captured Jordanian pilot.

Muath al-Kaseasbeh is his name. I want to say his name. If the video is legitimate and every one of ISIS’s videos has been legitimate, the “Caliphate” has stooped to a new low in its cruelty and depravity.

Apparently they dragged him in their signature orange jail suits to a cage, doused him with gasoline, and set him afire with great panache.

The Jordanians believe he was killed on January 3rd, long before ISIS dangled him as a pawn in an effort to secure the release of a woman in Jordan who has been condemned to death for being part of a suicide bombing in Amman ten years ago. Her own suicide vest failed to explode.

While having been disgusted at the beheadings, something about this latest death has caused me to feel anger, to want to do something to punish ISIS, to wish we had a hundred thousand snipers to deploy on them.

This was a step too far.

It has hung over me all day, a weight I should feel, I think. We have been at war so long we have all become a bit distant from the brutal meaning of humans killing other human beings. War is a brutal, brutish thing and takes men to the heart of a dark spot in their beings. It is no wonder we have so many veterans who are suffering the aftereffects of their time in service in Iraq and Afghanistan and every other place we have been in war.

Steven Pinker wrote the best selling book The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. He posits that over history we have gotten gentler.

It is hard on a day like this to believe it.

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Letter From New York 02 01 15 The Beat Goes On

February 1, 2015

In advance of Winter Storm Linus, I headed down to the city tonight as I have a couple of meetings tomorrow that I hope won’t be cancelled because of the weather. If they’re not, I want to be in place to have them.

Upstate, they are predicting nine to eighteen inches of snow and some bitter cold. In the city, it’s freezing rain and then some snow. Unpleasant but hopefully manageable.

Earlier today, I went to the Candlemas service at Christ Church Episcopal in Hudson, a lovely service that officially ended the Christmas season. It celebrates the presentation of the Baby Jesus at the Temple, as was required for all first born Jewish males.

On my way home I stopped at the Red Dot for an omelet while reading the NY Times on my iPhone.

The news of the day is grim, as seems to be usual, with some bright spots in the headlines.

The Egyptians released and then deported Peter Greste, an Australian who had been working for Al Jazeera and was arrested in December 2013, for allegedly supporting the recently deposed Muslim Brotherhood. He and two other Al Jazeera journalists were tried and sentenced to prison. An enormous international outcry ensued and the Egyptians have been looking for a way out ever since. A recently enacted law allows Egypt to deport convicted criminals who are not Egyptian citizens. Hence, Greste is on his way home today.

But the other two remain in prison. One has dual Egyptian/Canadian citizenship and may be allowed to renounce his Egyptian citizenship and then be deported to Canada. The other poor chap is only an Egyptian citizen and hence may spend the next years in jail.

That’s the pretty good news.

The really dark news is that Kenji Goto, a Japanese journalist kidnapped by ISIS, has apparently been beheaded in another gruesome killing. The fate of a downed Jordanian pilot who is being held by ISIS is unknown.

As I write this, the Super Bowl is about to start. I was going to watch but Linus intervened and I will keep up my record of not watching Super Bowls. My brother, an avid sports fan, surprised me by telling me he is NOT watching. He has not gotten over the Green Bay Packers loss to the Seahawks.

The tabloid press is all over the reports that Bruce Jenner, champion of the 1976 Olympics, is preparing to transition to being a woman on an E! Reality program. I have to respect his decision though some of it seems as if this is another Kardashian franchise and that feels a bit cheesy.

AMERICAN SNIPER continues to break Box Office Records while continuing to feed controversy. Michael Moore, the documentarian, has taken some swipes at the film apparently and apparently Sarah Palin was seen yesterday holding a sign that said: F**k you, Michael Moore.

Ah, Sarah, you are so classy.

California is working on legislation that will raise the legal age for smoking to twenty-one. Smoking is not what it used to be. A friend has an apartment in New York he can’t rent because the woman below is a heavy smoker. No one wants to live above her.

Long way from the days of Bogart and Bacall…

Just days shy of the three year anniversary of her mother’s death by drowning in a bathtub, Bobbi Kristina Brown, daughter of Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown, was found unresponsive in a bathtub in her home by her husband. Tonight, she is in a medically induced coma.

Over in Minsk, parties were to have gathered to see if another truce could be patched together in Ukraine. Talks lasted four hours before they contentiously broke up, each party blaming the other. In the meantime, the dying continues.

In other words, the beat of life goes on. War continues to rage. ISIS continues to behead. Troubled young women get in trouble and the Super Bowl is being played. By my next posting, a winner will have been declared. New York is about to be iced in and I’m going to go to Thai Market for dinner.

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Letter From New York 01 31 15 How lucky are we?

January 31, 2015

The days are growing longer. It is 5 PM and there is still light and I am grateful. It lightens my sprits for the days to be growing longer. Not so long ago it was dark at this time.

It is a white world that I look out upon. There was fresh snow yesterday and we are facing yet another storm that will lay another foot upon us and may disrupt my intentions of being in the city on Monday. It is very cold outside with wind chills of minus 15.

I am just back from a long and lovely lunch with my friends Larry Divney and Alicia Vergara. Recently they were in Mexico and while scouring a flea market there Alicia found two masks to bring back to me, knowing I collect them. They are wonderful and I already know where I will hang them. Primitive and powerful, they will make a great addition to my collection.

Alicia went off before we started lunch to buy something from one of the neighboring stores. While she was gone, Larry and I chatted about how lucky we are. For one, we are above ground. That’s always a good beginning. And we are living in Columbia County, New York. It’s a great place to be and we were having a lovely lunch at Ca’Mea, one of the best restaurants in Hudson. We had a martini and then a lovely white wine with lunch. I had onion soup and pasta with a chicken ragout – tremendous.

As we chatted, I confirmed how lucky we are. After all, we could be living in Donetsk in Ukraine, where there is a constant shelling of the city and where residents are running out of the most basic supplies. Apparently, the Russians are reinforcing the dissidents with their “little green men,” Russian soldiers or “volunteers” in uniforms with no markings. Lots of tanks have crossed over from Russian into Ukraine. They are dying by the dozens there.

We could be living in a hundred places where there is no peace but we are living in Columbia County, New York where there is a great deal of peace. Surrounded by white snow with more to come, it is hard to imagine a place more tranquil than this. As I waited for Larry and Alicia, I noticed two women at the bar, eating lunch and thought how lucky we all are. There is no shelling of the city where we live. We have all kinds of reserves. All we have to worry about is a coming snowstorm. That’s a luxury. In Donetsk, a snowstorm could be the difference between life and death.

In the “Caliphate” that is ISIS, there is video out that allegedly shows a second Japanese hostage being beheaded. I wince with pain that this is happening. While denouncing all the mistakes the west has made, ISIS is creating its own path of travesties, crimes committed for reasons I do not understand.

Far from my world of snow and peace, men are trampling on the rights of others in the name of religion. Christians and Protestants did it some centuries ago and now Islam is doing it, between Shia and Sunni.

We are so lucky to live where we do. As brutal as 9/11 was – and I lived through it – the thousands upon thousands who are dying in Islamic countries, as Sunnis kill Shias and Shias kill Sunnis, dwarf the numbers killed that day.  It goes on and on and on.

And I don’t really understand why. But then that’s what Christians were doing back a few centuries ago when Catholics and Protestants were locked in brutal warfare with each other, all in the name of God.

The sun has set. The floodlight on the fountain in my yard has turned on. I will soon go to a neighbor for dinner. We are gathering for a movie night, in a neighborhood where we aren’t worried about bombings. How lucky are we?

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Letter From New York 01 29 15 Recent events and good friends…

January 29, 2015

As I make the return journey from the city, I am riding alongside a steel grey Hudson River on a day that is equally grey. The world feels a gloomy place and there are reports of more deep cold and snow arriving. Looking out the window, it almost seems I am viewing a black and white film.

Here in New York, much of the news is focused on the fall of Sheldon Silver, the soon to be ex-Speaker of the State Assembly. His fall from grace is being chronicled by news outlets both on the left and right; it has been a stunning collapse in the fortunes of a man who has ruled the State Assembly with an iron fist for more than two decades. Accused of graft, he is being forced from his position and his maneuverings to exercise power in the background have been thwarted by newly elected legislators and forces from the suburbs around the city.

When first accused there were supporting voices. In the last week, they have fallen silent. His law firm has fired him. Fellow legislators and old friends are distancing themselves. He is in a very lonely spot.

The New England Patriots have more than one problem as they roll toward Super Bowl Sunday. There is the shadow cast on them by Deflategate; according to one report I read today, the majority of Americans think they did it. The NFL continues to investigate. But now they are facing the challenge that Tom Brady, legendary quarterback for the Pats, has a cold. He promises to be a hundred percent by the time of the game but he was sniffling and coughing all through a press conference.

Deflategate is serious to many. I find it both humorous and a little sad if somehow not surprising. People have been cheating since the beginning of time.

And since the beginning of time, opposing sides in a war have taken hostages. Today’s drama is once again focused in the Mideast. ISIS promised to release a Japanese hostage and not to kill a Jordanian pilot who is also a hostage in exchange for a woman sentenced to death in Jordan for being part of a suicide bombing that took place several years ago in Amman. As the sun sets, it appears negotiations have failed. ISIS has failed to prove the pilot is still alive and Jordan won’t move forward without that knowledge.

In the category of still trying to comprehend are two things. One is that the Koch brothers, two of the richest men on the planet, with their allies, plan to spend nearly a billion dollars to influence the 2016 elections. That is as much as either the Republicans or the Democrats will spend. Since the Kochs favor a conservative agenda, it effectively means doubling the resources available to the Republicans. It’s mind-boggling.

The other thing I am assimilating is the size of Apple’s quarterly earnings in the 4th quarter of 2014. It was the biggest quarterly profit in history, for any company, anywhere. $18 billion. There were a lot of iPhones sold, something like 74 million, which was far more than anyone was expecting.

Today I had a call with two old friends. We all worked in the cable business in the 80’s and 90’s and had not spoken in awhile so we set up a conference call. Medora and Bruce each have a daughter and they attended the same schools in California, though at different times. They had a lot to share about that and it was interesting to listen to. Bruce mentioned an article he had read this morning in the NY Times about the “Uberization” of work. We’ll only work when we’re needed, summoned perhaps by an app. It’s a novel thought and a bit frightening.

But mostly it was good to share some time with old friends and have a good old “chin wag” as my Australian friend Gour would say.

Whether you are living in America or a refugee camp in Turkey one of the things which supports us is the community of people around us. They help us stand when we think we will fall.

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Letter From New York 01 24 15 On the verge of singularity?

January 25, 2015

Night has fallen in Claverack, deep, dark night, the kind where you can see nothing outside your windows. Jazz plays in the background. It is chill but not as chill as it will be; tomorrow the temperature will plunge to 9 degrees and the lows will be that or lower for the rest of the week. Brrrr…

Waking this morning, I discovered four inches of fresh snow when only one had been predicted. It was beautiful though I waited to go out until the afternoon. I have a Prius, which is a lovely automobile but not great in snow. As I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, a wild turkey regally crossed in front of my window. The geese in the creek sailed majestically upstream, a flotilla of living beings, glorious in their beauty.

It’s been a quiet day. Waking early, I fixed coffee and snuggled down with the NY Times. Lazily, I got up and organized some things. Young Nick came and we sorted all the things that needed to go to the Transfer Station, the euphemistic term used in Columbia County for the dump. He shoveled my deck while the snowplow freed the driveway of snow. The orange County trucks plowed the streets. By noon, the world was back to normal.

Normal is a relative work, of course.

It looks like ISIS has beheaded one of the Japanese hostages. Gruesome.

Two planes were held in Atlanta after “credible” bomb threats.

Sarah Palin is considering a run for President while out in Iowa some are branding Chris Christie of New Jersey a flaming liberal. Ouch! Worst thing that a Republican candidate can be called!

In an interesting note today, Eric Schmidt, Chairman of Google, said the Internet would disappear! Not really. It just will fade into the background because it will be so integral to our lives. And, yes, I think that’s true. In a few years, we won’t be thinking about the Internet because it will be the thread of our lives. Google has just invested a billion dollars in Elon Musk’s efforts to connect all the unconnected with satellite delivered Internet services.

We’re moving into a very interesting world.

Years ago, I read Dan Simmons’ Hyperion novels, a quartet of books that laid out a world not unlike the one we are moving toward. Prescient in many ways; a dark vision of AI taking over man and man striking back, interlinked with all kinds of religious threads. I’ve read them twice. Supposedly they were going to be a movie but I don’t think that’s happening.

I think Elon Musk, CEO of Space X, has just given some millions to prevent AI from achieving a takeover of men, as in The Terminator or the Hyperion novels.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I don’t think I will be here when that happens, one way or the other. The actuarial tables indicate I won’t.

There are those who preach we are fast approaching The Singularity, the moment at which we create AI that is smarter than we are, when brains can be uploaded for a kind of immortality. Or when machines turn on us. Guestimates suggest that it will happen about 2040 and I am not sure I will last that long. Might be a good thing. I don’t want to be chased down the street by The Terminator when I am old.

We are, technologically, doing amazing things. We are transforming the world.

Yet tribal rivalries are causing huge cataclysms in our world. We advance but we regress. I get confused.

But we are humans, contradictory creatures that defy stereotypes, contradictory creatures that propel us dramatically toward a technological future we can barely imagine while at the same time some are desperate to draw us back into a barren past.

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Letter From New York 01 23 15 At home and out in the world…

January 23, 2015

It is a day when the sun has been sparkling off the ice on the drive. I knew it was four o’clock because the deer wandered across the yard in their daily pilgrimage. The setting sun, still bright, is casting long tree shadows outside my windows.

I am freshly back from the city, settling down into a freshly cleaned cottage, ready to enjoy the weekend. There are buckets of things to do tomorrow; I have emails to catch up on and bills to pay over the weekend.

A winter storm is coming, not a terrible one but they’re predicting about four inches of snow in total and the nights will be, for here, bitterly cold. Wood is stacked by the Franklin stove to help heat the house tomorrow.

After getting back home, I took a break and walked my neighborhood. The house that will forever, to me, be Rosemary’s cottage has been torn down and a new one is being built on the old footprint. It is a sign of change in the neighborhood. I haven’t really met the new owners yet, hopefully will. They’re living in a rental next door right now and haven’t been very visible.

Out in the wide, wide world Abdullah, King of Saudi Arabia, died, replaced by his half-brother Salman, who has assumed the throne and assured everyone he will continue the course. Abdullah was 90; Salman is 79. I think the older generation is thinning out and the younger ones will start getting a chance but will it make much of a difference? Stay tuned.

Out on Mars, the rover Opportunity is celebrating its eleventh anniversary. Designed to last for three months, it has kept on going and going and going with no signs of stopping. Remarkable little machine. Space stories give me so much delight.

Out in the Mideast, the deadline has passed for Japan to pay a ransom for two of its citizens being held by ISIS. The world waits to see what will happen.

Anyone who knows me knows that I don’t follow football. But even I have not been able to escape what has become known as Ballghazi and Deflategate. The Patriots apparently were playing with deflated balls when they defeated the Colts and that’s not allowed. Belichick, coach of the Patriots, and Tom Brady, the quarterback, have NO idea how that happened. NONE whatsoever. The NFL continues to investigate. And, for some reason, I find it fascinating.

What has been absolutely fascinating has been the arrest of Sheldon Silver, who is the Speaker of the State Assembly. Accused of taking millions as graft, the papers today were filled with photos of him being taken for arraignment in hand cuffs. The NY Times is calling for him to resign and the Post relished his predicament and devoted endless pages to it in their paper today.

It may well shake the very foundations of government in New York State, not that that would be a bad thing. New York is notorious – not as notorious as Illinois but the impression I’ve had is that Albany politics are pretty grimy.

So we go into the weekend, the sun almost set. Off to dinner with friends and then a cozy night at the cottage.

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Letter From New York 01 21 15 After the State of the Union Address…

January 21, 2015

Last night I finished dinner earlier than I had expected and before the State of the Union speech so I headed to the Café du Soleil and secured a place at the bar to watch as several years ago I cut the cord and do not have cable in either the cottage or in the apartment in New York.

The sound was off but I thought I’d be able to read the captions. Unfortunately, they were smaller than I would have liked and I may need to have my eyes examined as it was very hard to read and I caught just bits and pieces and so have spent part of the morning reading about Obama’s penultimate SOTU address.

He was combative, facing a Republican controlled Senate and Congress, coming out as far as I could tell as if he and his party had won the fall elections. But they didn’t. Obama laid out a populist plan for middle class relief paid for by enhancing taxes for the rich and big banks. I don’t think it stands an iceberg’s chance in hell of getting very far but, as I’ve said, he is now looking to his legacy.

It will be interesting to see what the legacy is of this President, elected in the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression, African-American, relatively untested in government. We will see.

In the meantime, it is early afternoon in the city and I was awoken, once again, by the beep beep beep of a truck backing up outside the apartment. I thought it was my alarm and I woke wondering how I had managed to change the alarm tone on my iPhone.

Even though a great Bose radio sits next to my bed, I use my iPhone as my alarm.

Drinking coffee, I used it to start reading about the world. Many of the stories and articles were exegesis of last night’s speech and I roamed through them. The first nine stories on the NY Times app were devoted to Obama and the speech.

It has been a quiet morning, emails, the Times and coffee. I have missed the quiet of the countryside and my desk which looks out both on the woods and the drive, have missed the deer crossing the yard and the flocks of geese inhabiting the creek but I have had things to do in the city and so I’m here.

It’s a grey, chilly day with promises of snow for tonight though nothing like the snow that paralyzed the city a year ago, something like twelve inches fell then. The tony Upper East Side did not get promptly plowed which caused some to accuse the then newly elected Mayor DeBlasio of waging class warfare.

I think that’s subsided.

Beyond the fallout to the President’s speech, the world has been buzzing on. In France, more police are being hired to fight terrorism. In Germany, the head of the Anti-Islam movement, Pegida, has resigned after pictures of him as Adolf Hitler surfaced. In Japan, Prime Minister Abe is attempting to find a way to save two Japanese citizens from being beheaded. ISIS is demanding $200 million for them.

The Republican race for President is heating up. The Koch brothers, richer together than Bill Gates, are holding an invitation only event for politicians sympathetic to their beliefs. There’s a bum’s rush going on to get there. Though Jeb Bush won’t be; he has scheduling conflicts. Chris Christie is off to Iowa to court that state’s Republicans, hoping for a warm reception to burnish his tarnished star.

And today, the list of worst passwords was released. Apparently, we are not very inventive when it comes to them. The worst? 123456. Second worst: password. Come on, we can do better than that!

So, all in all, it is a rather ordinary day in America, post the SOTU address. We have a lot of talk about it and we have chosen bad passwords. We can do more about one than the other.

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Letter From New York 01 12 15 Venturing back to the city…

January 12, 2015

Last night, I returned to New York City to have dinner with a friend, David, who was in town from Delaware. It was interesting stepping off the train and throwing myself into the mild mayhem that is Penn Station, so much grittier and grim than Grand Central Station.

There is always, now, a moment when I take a deep breath before plunging in to the swarm. Really, it is an assault on the senses. Parts of the station seem to be falling apart. Tarps lined one of the ceilings to keep rain from falling on our heads, I guess.

Meeting David at his hotel, we went just a half block to Angus’ in the Theater District and had a meal and a drink and a good catch-up. As I don’t have cable either at home or at the little apartment in New York, I watched the Golden Globes with David. The moment that stood out to me was in George Clooney’s acceptance speech for the Cecil B. DeMille Award. He said something to the effect that everyone in the room had managed to grab the brass ring, they were inside the tent and getting to do what they wanted. And it is true, people in that room, for the most part, had grabbed the brass ring. Good for him for saying so.

This morning when I left the apartment building, William, the daytime doorman, reminded me it was raining outside. I thanked him for the warning but ventured out without an umbrella. I had forgotten that all the umbrellas are at the cottage. It was a wet, chill day in New York, grey and somber, streets slick with rain and everyone a little damp and miserable.

In contrast to the bucolic setting of the cottage, the city makes it easy to be reminded of all the things happening in the world. Sirens blare, ambulances screech through the streets, police cars race from one point to the next, lights all rotating madly, enough to give one an attack of some sort. Here it is possible to feel close to the chaos that was Paris last week.

Sitting waiting for an appointment, CNN Breaking News as well as the BBC announced that ISIS had hacked into the twitter account of Centcom, the US Military Command. I wondered if we had moved into the era of total cyber warfare? Centcom defined the attack as cyber-vandalism. When does vandalism cross into being an attack?

I feel less dispassionate in the city. The world is very close to you. The reality of trouble is only a fingertip away. Winding my way through the streets and traversing the subway, I felt a greater need to be alert, to be a bit more careful. Part of me wanted to slip away as quickly as I could, to once again bathe in the calm of the cottage. I am here tonight, gone tomorrow and then back again on Wednesday for a dinner meeting. I’ll stay, probably, the rest of the week. It will be interesting to see how I adapt to city life again after so much time in the country.

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Letter From New York 12 30 14 The changing landscape around us…

December 30, 2014

Just as I sat down to write today, a veritable herd of deer crossed the yard, followed by one straggler who was obviously hurt, bounding as best she could on three legs while the rest were far ahead. It was touching and I instinctively wanted to run out and see what I could do for her – but I wouldn’t know and she is now long gone.

The sun is setting in the west; today, unlike the days before, was bright and sunny with brilliant cheer, chill but definitely not Minnesota cold. My brother told me it would be seven below there this morning. I woke to twenty-seven degrees. All the snow is gone now; the world looks more like a barren fall landscape than a winter wonderland.

The year is ending and everyone seems to be coming up with a top ten list, some of winners, some of losers but magazines are counting. Deadline Hollywood came up with part of its top ten films, which included FURY, UNBROKEN, AMERICAN SNIPER and Rory Kennedy’s documentary, LAST DAYS IN VIET NAM. Four of the five were war movies, which seems to have been on our mind this year.

It’s not surprising; we have been living with war for a long time now. Afghanistan is formally over and done but there are still boots on the ground and NATO still has a presence. Iraq and Syria burn and we have, of course, the Boko Haram in Africa.

Steven Pinker, author of THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE, argues that overall violence is down from where it has historically been. This morning in The Times that sentiment was echoed with the caveat that because of Syria and Ukraine there has been an uptick in the last year but that there are “only” something like eleven conflicts happening when there used to be dozens.

Perhaps it just seems to be more to us in America because we have had Iraq and Afghanistan for so long and they don’t seem to be going away. We’ve had to face ISIS this last year, too. But all in all, over the course of my lifetime, it appears that overall violence has declined and while I find that hard to believe sometimes, the empirical evidence seems to point that way.

And that is good.

Now there is a pink tinge to the sky as the light of the day begins to fail; the bare trees claw the sky and make for a magic scene out the windows by my desk. It is a perfect time for contemplation and thought; soft jazz plays in the living room on Pandora.

Lights are beginning to come on around the neighborhood, soon the automatic lights will snap on as the dark descends.

As I sit in this bucolic setting, I say a quiet prayer for the families of the people on the lost Air Asia flight. Bodies and wreckage have been found; another Malaysian linked plane has been lost, the third this year.

My mind also goes to Alexei Navalny, the Russian dissident who was given a suspended sentence for fraud. Thousands gathered in Moscow to protest the sentence and he joined them and was arrested again. It is suspected he was given a suspended sentence to avoid his becoming a political martyr. Putin has taken on all the powers of the Tsar, Autocrat of all the Russias. He just hasn’t crowned himself. Perhaps before it’s done, he’ll follow the example of Napoleon and put the crown on his own head.

Ah, darkness has fallen. The automatic lights have clicked on. I must go and prep for dinner with friends, in the seemingly unending string of dinner and cocktail parties.

Tomorrow, I must make a decision as to which of the two parties to which I am invited I will attend to ring out the old and bring in the new. Not bad decisions to have to make.

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Letter From New York 12 24 14 Free to celebrate Christmas…

December 24, 2014

It is Christmas Eve. To me, Christmas was all about Christmas Eve. It was the night when I was a child that my godparents and their brood arrived at the house and we opened presents, had a great dinner. They departed and then we opened the rest of our treasure trove of presents. And then, when I was old enough, we headed off to Midnight Mass at our parish church.

I’ve fond memories of those Christmases and so I always associate Christmas with Christmas Eve, not Christmas Day. On Christmas Day, we opened what Santa had left us, which wasn’t much. I always knew the big presents came from my parents. It didn’t bother me that much when I found out Santa wasn’t real.

I’ve been up since early this morning, cooking and prepping. I’m having my friends Lionel and Pierre, Larry and Alicia. We’ll gather at six for cocktails and then dinner and then they will head off to their respective Christmas services while I clean up and prep for tomorrow as I am cooking Christmas Day, too. And I’m giving a cocktail party on Friday night. And then, whoosh, it will all be gone.

All day I’ve been in a good mood, listening to jazzy Christmas Carols and cooking pumpkin soup and prepping sweet potatoes. The ham is in and cooking away and there is a wonderful smell to the house as you come in. In a few minutes, Lionel and Pierre will arrive and we will exchange presents and then Pierre is off to sing at the Catholic Church. Later, they will both sing at the Episcopal Church.

Tomorrow, in the morning, young Nick and his partner, Beth, and their child, Alicia, will come over. It’s a bit like extended family and their presents are nestled beneath the tree and it will be exciting to watch the almost three-year-old Alicia open her gifts. She is into “Frozen” [what three year old is not this year?] so I got her a “Frozen” comforter for her bed as well as a stuffed animal that needs a home and someone to love it and an ornament for their tree with her name engraved on it. It’s fun to shop for a wide-eyed little girl. It’s really the only opportunity I have to do it.

It is a grey, rainy day and, actually, quite warm. The temperature scraped fifty degrees this afternoon. It wouldn’t have surprised me if this were the kind of weather Joseph and Mary might have trudged through on their way to obey the order of Caesar Augustus to be counted. I’m not sure what the weather is like in Bethlehem this time of year so I did what anyone does when they want an answer to a question. I googled it. In Bethlehem it is fifty-five degrees and clear.

So not that much different, except we’re having rain.

Thousands are gathered there tonight for Mass. In Rome, Pope Francis prepares to say his Midnight Mass after giving his Curia a scathing review this week and while he calls for attention to the thousands of Christians displaced because of ISIS.

Christians are now, once again, probably the most persecuted of religions. They, and other minorities have had to flee their homes, where they have lived since New Testament times, because of the campaigns waged on them by the Islamic State.

In Africa, Christians are living in fear of Boko Haram, which is setting about to create its own Islamic State in Nigeria.

It is strange to think of Christians as being persecuted but that’s the fact of the matter. In some parts of the world where they are a minority, they are being relentlessly pursued.

It is a sobering thought as I return to my festive cooking. Everything at dinner will need to go like clock work because all my guests need to be leaving for their Christmas celebrations. And they are free to do that.

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