3 posts tagged “rant”
I still have far to go in making the site look more creative and interesting and keeping up with posting enough audio to keep people listening, but I am amazed at how easy it is. It only took me recording via the built-in mic on my Mac PowerBook laptop using Quicktime 7 Pro (only a $29.95 purchase) and then using Apple's iWeb program to quickly and simply create a page for my podcasts. Then I just use my .Mac account (a little over $100 for a year it costs me, but with many benefits that pay for themselves for the avid Mac user), and that's where I host the collection of podcasts. I even now have an ongoing feed displayed on my main blog at Tribe.net.
In the wee hours this morning, as small flakes of the white crap began to fall and hurriedly try to outpace my avoidance of it... as I was screeching my way around corners to get to work in my car (okay, maybe that's overly dramatizing it, but my fervor to get to the Greenbelt Metro station at breakneck speed was very near teetering on the verge of being a tad insane)... I was listening to The Writer's Almanac on NPR (via WAMU), narrated by Garrison Keillor.
One quote that struck me as being very meaningful and very nearly summing up the very reason for life was by Galway Kinnell, an author whose name I'd never heard before today: "Maybe the best we can do is do what we love as best we can." I believe the writer Willa Cather once said something along those same lines.
Once I got through the fiasco of beating the clock, which is a usual occurrence for me, all was well in my micro-corner of the world. Our company is taking us to lunch at the nearby Asia Bistro and picking up the tab today, and I'm on my third book in the past few weeks, somehow miraculously being able to carve out more time for reading. I'm now a chapter into "French Women Don't Get Fat," by Mireille Guiliano, what promises to be a trendy, European, no-nonsense approach to not just a diet but a way of life by appreciating and incorporating food as pleasure without shouldering the burden of constant guilt.
So far I find most interesting how she opines that French ladies don't feel they have to spend every waking moment obsessing over their diets and bringing them up in conversation. Instead, they talk more about their passions in life and love. I think Americans could take a lesson from the French, although most of us won't admit to it.
I'm proud to be an American, but, for me, it does not border on religious zealotry, something I think has become a problem in this country. It is one thing to be proud of your country and support it but another to try to say a life lost by that of another nationality is not as valuable just because it does not bleed "red, white and blue."
I believe our values in this country are seriously mixed up. I was appalled yesterday when I was switching channels and came across Country Music Television and heard the words of a song by Lynyrd Skynyrd called "Red White and Blue." An excerpt from the song goes: "That's where were [sic] at. If they don't like it, they can just get the HELL out!" I took the "they" the band speaks of to be either liberals, foreigners or both.
This is basically the attitude of many people I've experienced in rural areas like where I grew up. We live in this great country, so that we have the freedom to express our opinions, and that's great. But more of what we express seems to be hatred toward those who are different. There seems to be a disconcerting upsurge in it lately. Look at our recent celebrities feeling okay with hurling slurs at race and sexual orientation.
So I'm going to express my opinion here: People, we will not get anywhere by separating ourselves from the rest of the world, by not signing the Kyoto Treaty and by being the pompous, rude, self-centered, I-don't-need-to-learn-your-stupid-language type of American when we travel. This is a global world.
Terrorism is a real threat, and, yes, we do have to protect our country and do something about it, but there is a whole wide world out there, and I am constantly astonished by how many people function as if we are cast members of the Truman Show who have no awareness of anything outside of certain boundaries. Or, if we do, we have limited knowledge of it and just ignorantly assume it's all inferior.
I am a soldier. I love my country. I love my country and the ground of it beneath my feet. I love the people I know who defend it "against all enemies, foreign and domestic." But I cannot condone unwarranted hatred bred of ignorance nor function within the realm of such an insular manner of living.
Basically, I believe, above that, we in this world are all one people connected under one Universe, and we share some rudimentary things in common: All of us would like to continue breathing the same air under the same blue sky in the same (hopefully) continuing existence of an environment.
