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Letter From New York November 24, 2014

November 24, 2014

The days are slipping away as we hurtle toward Thanksgiving and the Holidays. The leaves are virtually gone from the trees here in the Hudson Valley; ragged winds the last few nights have finished them off. One more time I will have to have the gutters emptied and then we should be good until spring.

Today, it is nearly seventy degrees and I am just freshly in from a walk around my circle, stopping to chat with a couple of neighbors – one, like me, out for a walk and the others battening down the hatches getting their antique car ready for winter. It is cocooned in tarps all winter and then comes out gleaming in the spring, fresh and ready for another summer.

They’re the ones who told me that there is talk of a nor’easter come Turkey Day. My pie man, David, alerted me this morning he wants to come on Wednesday to make his delivery as he is concerned about what it will be like on Thanksgiving itself. Sounds like a storm acomin’.

And it’s hard to think of a winter bluster bearing down on us when it is too warm to even wear a sweater on a walk around the circle today.

Last night I went to a charity event down in Rhinebeck at The Rhinecliff Hotel, a money raiser for a group of teens who go from the local high school down to Nicaragua to build classrooms in a village called La Cieba. They’ve been doing it for six or seven years. My friend Robert’s daughter is going on this year’s trip and so he invited me down.

I was touched by the camaraderie and bonhomie between the students, young and fresh and ready to do good things. Cue the applause for them. They had shiny, well scrubbed faces and oozed of optimism.

They made me smile. And I felt better for knowing they were around. I was impressed with how comfortable they seemed in their skins and personhoods. They laughed and touched while signaling their peacefulness with their presence in the world. They weren’t sullen. And they were going home from working the event to do their math for the next day.

It was heart warming.

What’s not so heart warming are all the other things going on in the world so far from the place inhabited by those optimistic teens of yesterday. There was a suicide bombing in Afghanistan; ISIS may behead another hostage. There is a staccato beat of bad news that has infiltrated the very soul of the world, which was why it was so refreshing to meet those young people last night – alive with their hopes and dreams and aspirations and seemingly feeling empowered to be able to create change.

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Letter From New York September 26, 2014

September 27, 2014

Or, as it seems to me…

The whole of the Hudson Valley is enveloped in grey, with rain occasionally splottering down on me – though so far the torrential rains promised for this afternoon have yet to appear.

Earlier this week I read a NY Times column by Roger Cohen reminding us that things aren’t as bad as they seem. He was fairly upbeat: he dismissed ISIS as a bunch of thugs in trucks and Putin as a thug running a failing regime. New York is a better place than it has been, perhaps ever. And that is true, he says of a lot of American cities – they are better than they ever were! Hey, even Detroit is beginning something of a comeback.

His article buoyed me through a couple of days, into today, when the grey kind of “got to me” and I began to fret about the world in which I live. The boys of ISIS may just be thugs in trucks but they are killing by the thousands and causing people to become refugees in the hundreds of thousands. They are, unfortunately, effective thugs. Putin may be a thug at the head of a failing regime but failing though it may be, he can still stir up trouble of all kinds.

New York is probably better than it has ever been while it is more unaffordable than it has ever been. Manhattan seems to becoming an island of only the rich. Certainly seems to be the case in Midtown, where Billionaire’s Row is rising.

Yet I cannot bring myself to completely despair – not quite in my nature. But there are plenty of reasons to be concerned, even as some hopeful signs bloom. One of the American auto companies is adding 1200 employees to one of its plants to keep up with demand. That is a good sign. So is that new homes sales reached their highest point since 2008.

Winston Churchill is supposed to have said: You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing – after they have tried everything else.

The question we face is what is the right thing to do, particularly in the Mideast. The warriors of ISIS are thugs and that’s part of the attraction they offer their followers, the opportunity for uneducated young men to practice sanctioned thuggery. Their wild brand of Sunni extremism seems to be an outgrowth of Saudi religious extremism. Which apparently is causing the Saudi King some concern; he has brought his Kingdom into the fray, his Air Force flying sorties against ISIS.

It is a bit of a diplomatic coup that Obama has managed to put together any kind of coalition to fight ISIS, especially one that includes other Sunnis. [While I am beginning to recognize the differences I can’t tell you what theological dispute resulted in this devolution to thuggery.] I am sure I will learn more as it is impossible to follow world news without also learning more about the nuances of Islam, as multi-layered and confusing, it seems, as is Christianity.

The fear I have is that we are living on the cusp of an Islamic Reformation. Some scholars say we are long overdue for a Reformation within Islam. That does not cause sanguinity within me; look what happened during the Christian Reformation. Wars and pestilence ravaged the land while Christians killed each other because they disagreed with how others worshipped Christ. It was all very unchristian.

And I fear that is what might be happening in Islam. You don’t worship Allah the way I worship Allah and so therefore you are damned and deserve to die. You are heretic. Ah, harkens to that wonderful time known as the Inquisition. Christians refined torture to a delightful degree, practicing it on other Christians.

The easy thing to say is that religion, of any kind, is the root of all evil. But perhaps within religion answers can be found and perhaps Islam can learn from the mistakes of their Christian brothers.

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Letter From New York September 16, 2014

September 16, 2014

Or, as it seems to me…

As I begin to write this, it is a quiet night. I am sitting in the kitchen of my friends Dawn and Gail’s home in Provincetown, Massachusetts. They are out with friends and I am sitting putting together my thoughts about the past week.

It was another anniversary of 9/11, the 13th. There was for me a certain symmetry to this one. On September 10th, 2001 I spent the evening with Jon Alpert, the visionary filmmaker, at a screening of a film he had done about the election in New York that was about to happen, Mark Green versus the billionaire Mike Bloomberg.

An early review of the film said that it would topple Bloomberg’s chances of winning the election. Mike Bloomberg came across as arrogant, privileged, ill-mannered, capricious and not a good candidate for Mayor. But then 9/11 happened and the world changed and a billionaire businessman seemed the best person to take over a city that was reeling from a great catastrophe. And, it turned out, he wasn’t a bad mayor. He may have been capricious, ill-mannered, arrogant and privileged but he brought the city back from the brink and carried it through the dark days of 2001 and 2002 when the city was so wounded it didn’t understand how it would survive its pain.

So on September 10th, 2014, on the eve of the 13th anniversary of 9/11 I found myself back in the company of Jon Alpert. He and I had dinner with our mutual friend Diana Sperazza, currently an Executive Producer for Investigation Discovery. Before that, she had been at Discovery Times Network and had been the EP on a project we had done ten years ago, OFF TO WAR.

We laughed and reminisced and talked about 9/11, 2001. Diana had been living in Washington. I had been in New York. Jon had been in New York, too. Filmmaker that he is, he grabbed a camera and headed towards the catastrophe and caught poignant images of that day. He had marched from his organization’s headquarters in the oldest firehouse in New York, mere blocks from Ground Zero and managed to get past the barricades. His footage ended up in an HBO special.

The weather has been eerily like that surrounding 9/11. Beautiful, sun kissed days. All summer I have thought about how like that time this summer has been and have had an uneasy feeling. 9/11 in New York was the most beautiful day and we have had the most beautiful summer. Some part of me has lived in fear that some terrible event would befall us this beautiful summer.

We made it through. There was no repeat of 9/11. No mass terrorist event.

But we now live in a world that is the child of that day. Since then, we have invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and made a bloody mess of them. ISIS has just killed yet another Western hostage. The Caliphate rises; Arab states want to stop them but are tepid in their support of our desire to stop them. Various terrorist groups now seem to be starting to cooperate, lending their “expertise” to each other. Beheadings are becoming a trend. Egyptian terrorists have started using the gruesome practice in hopes of getting as much attention as ISIS or ISIL or IS, whatever they are being called.

The world feels like a more dangerous place these days. Our outrage against beheadings doesn’t stop them. Sanctions haven’t tempered Mr. Putin’s expansionist tendencies. And our response to Ebola has been slow and strangely muted.

A strange exhaustion has fallen upon us. Everyone seems tired on all sides of the political equation. Boehner seems reading a script as opposed to acting from conviction. One pundit described Obama as a bird in gilded cage, waiting to be let out. Like many Presidents, the office is aging him rapidly.

So we go on, living our lives as best we can while the world seems whirling out of control. Here at home our infrastructure is decaying as we fight wars to keep the barbarians from the gates.

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Letter From New York September 3, 2014

September 3, 2014

Or, as it seems to me…

The sun is playing hide and seek with the clouds; it is warm but not hot, only slightly humid. Sighing, I am noticing that more leaves outside my window where I write are turning yellow while the soft breeze blows through the branches.

Outside my living room and dining room windows, a tree is being taken down; struck last year by lightening; it has given up the fight. Dying, it needs to be removed lest it fall upon the cottage. I am sorry to see it go; it was a good, strong tree that provided shade to the deck. It was sturdy; it had its place in my life and then, literally, lightening struck and it now is going. It will change my view of the creek; its departure will change my life a little.

But that is what they say life is about: changes. So I have to embrace the change. I am doing a lot of that lately, with having moved on from Odyssey. Appointments in the city moved from this week to next and I find myself with a week at the cottage, an unexpected delight – and a challenge. Now that I do not need to go into town everyday, I am discovering how to discipline myself so I don’t go completely to seed here at the cottage.

The day begins, as it always does, with a perusal of the news from the NY Times, assimilating what has happened overnight. Today there may or may not be a ceasefire in the Ukraine but the possibility of one is a hopeful sign.  

The world is continuing to grapple with the death of American Steven Sotloff, gruesomely beheaded by ISIS [or IS or ISIL, depending on which source you’re reading or who is being quoted].

And, in another sign of change, the New York St. Patrick’s Day Parade, will now allow gay groups to march in it. Come next March 17th you can be out and proud and Irish all in the same parade.

Not all change is bad; much of it, in fact, is good if we allow room for it in our lives. That old adage: nothing stays the same is true. Recently, I cleaned out a box of old pictures and nothing reminds you of the time going by then photos of yourself from a different time and life.

I consigned them to the dustbin of history and sent them to be recycled. I am more concerned about now than then. I have carved out a good life for myself here at the cottage and down in the city. I am embracing it. I smile to myself at times; it is a time to cherish, watching the light splatter on my drive, the little fountain in the center of the circular drive gurgling. I have good friends, good neighbors, and good things happening – all the while the world is changing about me.

Carpe diem, said the Romans. Seize the day! And so I am seizing the day and moving on with it, nurtured by the sight of leaves turning in one more cycle of life.

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Letter From New York September 02, 2014

September 2, 2014

Or, as it seems to me… 

I learned a hard lesson yesterday; I wrote a blog directly on WordPress and then there was a glitch and all my eloquent words disappeared into digital dust. So I have learned to draft in Word and copy and paste into WordPress. A small lesson.

I was writing about how beautiful it was but how the leaves had begun to change – fall is no longer far away. You can reach out and touch it.

My mind was focused on the dichotomy between the sylvan beauties of the cottage here in Claverack and the harsh realities when you get away from this little spot. Not so far away Hudson is transforming itself into a quaint town, full of gentrified housing and charming shops and galleries. In twenty-five years, I suspect the town will be rather like Provincetown without the Atlantic.

But that doesn’t change the fact there is poverty in Hudson now and that some of it seems intractable. It’s not the kind of poverty you witness in India but it is hardscrabble for America.

Go a little further afield and you find that Ferguson, MO is still restless and wounded after the shooting of the unarmed Michael Brown. A call for a traffic stoppage mostly didn’t materialize yesterday, at the request of Michael’s father. The death of young Michael Brown has caused America to pause and think about the state of race relations. Have we really come all that far?

African-Americans make up the majority of inmates in prisons. They have higher incidences of poverty. They are more likely to get harassed by the police.

I was at a conference in Washington, DC not so long ago, hosted by Sojourners, a progressive Christian organization. In one of the sessions, the founder of Sojourners, Jim Wallis, asked the audience to look into their hearts to see what private prejudices they maintained. And looking into my heart, I was not innocent. Underneath the surface, it took an extra beat to push back the societal prejudices, not to mention some familial prejudices, that I was raised with – while I might not act upon those thoughts, I still had those thoughts, enough that I sometimes consciously had to batten them down.

I don’t like that.

But it is real. And I suspect is realer than we would really like to admit.

It is nearing the end of the day and reports are filtering out that ISIS, the tightly organized group that is carving out a rogue state, an Islamic Caliphate in Syria and Iraq, has beheaded another American, Steven Sotloff, a freelance journalist captured in Syria. Another atrocity in a region filled with atrocities, lands now overflowing with refugees and where suicide bombings seem like a daily event. A world away from the quiet of Patroon Street in Claverack, NY but still in and of my world.

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Letter From New York August 31, 2014

August 31, 2014

Or, as it seems to me…

Yesterday was the postcard version of a Hudson River Valley day: the sky was a soft blue, the temperature and humidity was moderate. It was a perfect day for the things I did: Saturday chores, going to the Farmer’s Market and collecting fresh fruit and vegetables [ah, the cantaloupe and donut peaches were succulent], followed by a trip to Olde Hudson for cheeses and pate – all in preparation for two friends coming over for a dinner of nibbles and bits over Prosecco and white wine. I took a long walk around my circle, stopping to chat with one of my neighbors. It was a perfect country Saturday.

I slept in lazily today, hitting the snooze alarm more than once, stretching slowly into awake land, followed by a pot of French Press coffee and some time on the deck overlooking the creek, catching up on the world via the New York Times and BBC News, both of whose apps I have on my iPhone. Soft yellow sunlight danced across the deck while the creek flowed lazily down to the pond. 

But then the skies grew darker and the sunlight danced offstage, the blue sky was replaced by nickel grey; checking the forecast I see that thunderstorms are predicted for the afternoon.

It felt the sky grow darker as I read the news stories, each one a bit darker than the last. Yesterday evening, my friends and I didn’t confront the happenings in the world until long into the evening. The news of the day came up and we skittered away from it immediately, only returning to contemporary events when we were deep in the evening, comforted by a glass of Prosecco or two.

Out in the Mideast, ISIS is seemingly being more than somewhat successful in creating its Caliphate in parts of Syria and Iraq, cleverly using all kinds of media to further their cause and to recruit supporters from the West to come and devote their lives to Jihad. In the Middle East their message is harsh and brutal: see what we are doing, watch this beheading, see us massacre Syrian or Iraqis, watch us kill the apostate Shia.

In the West, their message is more tempered: come and be with us, you can give up your job and fat life in the West for Jihad because you know your heart is empty and depressed. Jihad is the cure for depression, according to Mohammed.

And to give oneself up to a cause bigger than you can give anyone a thrill of exhilaration, a sense of deadly purpose to the confusion of life and this is what ISIS is playing upon to disaffected Muslims in the West. Come join us; your wives and children will be safe and cared for while you fulfill the Prophet’s higher purpose for you. 

And it is working some; at least two Americans have died fighting for the cause in Syria, one who lived in my home state of Minnesota at least for awhile. It’s hard for me to imagine a Minnesotan fighting jihad in Syria but it has happened. Rather than stressing how good a Western passport is for importing terror to the West, new recruits are being encouraged to burn their passports as a sign they have turned their back on the decadent West and embraced the jihadi cause. We will secure the Caliphate first and then turn our attention to the Satan in the West.

All of this is frightening. Airstrikes have beaten back ISIS in several quarters but the war goes on, as it will go on, as impassioned young men and women, fighting for something they feel is greater than themselves, more important than themselves, seek to upturn the borders made a century ago by the western Allies after the Ottoman Empire fell.

It is amazing and distressing and almost incomprehensible to me that so many are so seduced by such a brutal interpretation of Mohammed. It is as Christians only were responding to the harsh and cruel in the Bible and leaving out the rest – or at least it seems to me. The Islam I studied in college was not so cruel, so harsh, so brutal. It embodied empathy and poetry and human virtues in ways Christianity was not doing in the medieval west.

But here we are. Bloodlust reigns as it often has in human history, always leaving behind a trail of tears.

 

 

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Letter From New York August 11, 2014

August 11, 2014

Letter From New York
August 10, 2014
Or, as it seems to me…

Sunday mornings usually have a bit of a ritual. I wake up, start the coffee I’ve prepared the night before and while sipping that first, oh so important, cup peruse the New York Times on either my iPhone or my iPad. If I am ambitious, which is not as often as I think it should be, I go down to Christ Church for services.

At some point on Sunday, I go through the “Weddings/Celebrations” section of the Times. It gives me great pleasure to see same sex wedding announcements. I didn’t think that would ever happen in my lifetime. So I honor those folks by reading their stories. Many of them cause me to smile.

I think I enjoy it because it gives me a sense of hope for the world; that we’re actually moving on from old prejudices. It is heartening in a frequently disheartening world, a gentling of the world, reflected in one major thing having changed in the universe.

My good friends, David and Annette, came up this weekend and stayed with me. We celebrated years of friendship over an excellent dinner of farm fresh foods – salad fixings direct from the garden, recently butchered organic meat, summer squash, potatoes pulled from the earth only the day before. They brought an excellent Pinot Noir and we ate at the dining room table after David had grilled the steaks on the barbeque. Spectacular.

We had great conversation. The world is fodder for it and it is impossible to run away from the trouble that is assaulting the world. Ebola is now an International Health Crisis. Ann Coulter has raged against the doctor who contracted the disease while serving as a Christian missionary in Africa. He should have stayed home according to her.

ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, now controlling a great swath of the both Syria and Iraq, seems determined to drag the region they control back to feudal times. Christians have been driven from their homes, as have Yazidis, who practice a faith that seems to combine Christianity, Islam and Zoroasterism. They, along with Christians and Shiites are “infidels” who deserve to die according to ISIS. Some Yazidis have been reported buried alive and some women taken as slaves while other have fled to the desert hot Mount Sinjar, where there has been some relief provided by the US dropping humanitarian supplies while fighter planes and drones attack the advancing ISIS troops, who are proving hard to beat back.

There is not a huge amount I can do about the Christians and Shia and Yazidis, except to donate to relief services – though I haven’t seen many appeals.

We are a world in need. I agonize over the daily pleas I get from any number of worthy causes, sometimes slipping toward a kind of despair because the needs are far greater than my wallet. We have a border crisis that revolves around children, illegal immigrants, yes, but children too. Many of them are fleeing San Pedro Sula in Honduras, now the murder capital of the world, a city I visited as a teen when my brother was running a clinic for children in nearby El Progresso, itself then described as the “armpit of Central America.” Things have gone from bad to worse there – as they seem to be in so many places, going from bad to worse.

It is unbelievable to me in some ways that I can have a wonderful and civilized dinner with two wonderful and civilized friends while some thousands of miles away ISIS is burying alive people because they believe differently. It reminds me of the way Catholics and Protestants treated each other several centuries ago during the Thirty Years War.

We live, so many of us, blessed lives here in the West while in other parts of the world madmen seem to roam freely, seeking to enforce a way of life that appears insane to us in the West. I wouldn’t call the leadership of ISIS enlightened.

But then we are the Infidel.

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