Mourn The Past Or Prepare For The Future?

I much prefer the company of those who dedicate themselves to prepare for the future... 

The 11th Annual Patriot Day and National Day of Service and Remembrance has arrived.  The flag is lowered, we bow our heads, and are inclined to look back to mourn the past.  Arnold Bogis, a writer at the excellent Homeland Security Watch blog, recommends rather that we honor our heroes by training new ones.  I agree with him.  

As the most social of all primates, humans will follow the group, for good and for ill.  The herd, the troop, the tribe will choose compassion or cruelty.  Leadership creates the direction.  The able response mounted by emergency services at the Boston Marathon modeled appropriate action and made it easy for witnesses to become rescuers.  Like most all animals, we have three responses to threat: flight,fight, or freeze.  As individuals we do not rise to the occasion, we default to our level of training.  Effective training and frequent drill can create the difference between evacuation or rout, resistance or riot, a moment of evaluation or mindless panic.  As leaders we instill in our team members, communities, and families the habits they present to the world and the reflexes they will apply under stress.  Whether we model habits mindfully or carelessly is up to each of us, every day.

 

 

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

It wasn't all just sleeping in, sipping dark roast, and reading...

 

First, there was a deck and railings to power wash, scrape, sand, repair, prime, paint, strip, brighten, stain, and re-stain wet.

Then there were ornamentals and stone.  About it I wrote to my friend Jim yesterday: 

Here is our latest completed project. It's been some time since I moved a ton of gravel...by shovel and wheeled barrow.  The tree is a hydrangea, the evergreens are a low growing juniper, and the annuals at the far end are mums. There's a slate paver between the flowers that increased my total weight lifting by 50 pounds or so. Then I tuned the irrigation system to treat its new charges properly. All this for a house in which I no longer live and which we will likely sell before we have time to witness any growth.

Jim, a retired Roman Catholic priest in his late 60s who planted a stand of oak seedlings just three years ago, replied:

"What is planting except belief in the future...that is not our own. We are the planters; others will reap what we have sown." - Oscar Romero

I am not worthy of friends as wise as him...but I am grateful.

Why I Hate DIY Landscaping Projects

Some people do this for fun, others hire it done...

No, that wasn't an old root, it was the main irrigation line.  Yes, that is a shovel inflicted gash just below the clamped splice.  Ack!  Thpppt!

Yes, it is good to live near a Home Depot.  An hour later, I managed to break even and returned to prepping the front yard of the house where I no longer live for some shrubbery.

To paraphrase Greta Garbo, "I want to be in a condo!" 

Alas, Seamus Heaney Is Dead

And more's the pity...

Irish poet and man of letters, Seamus Heaney translated my favorite edition of Beowulf. I made a gift of that translation to my late and much lamented friend Eric S.H. Ching one Christmas not so long ago.  Heaney's passing also reminds me of my embarrassing, odd, and unrequited ambivalence about my Irish heritage.  

Rest in peace, Seamus Heaney, aged only 74 years...gone too soon.

How soon the grave beckons, inexorable, regardless the quality of our contribution.

Homegrown Violent Extremism by Erroll Southers

Brought to our attention by Arnold Bogis at Homeland Security Watch...

Thanks for bringing our attention to Erroll Southers’ new book Homegrown Violent Extremism

Coincidentally, Mr. Southers is currently working for Johnathan Tal, of TAL Global, an associate of mine from the Silicon Valley days.  Southers has a blog where he discussed his book in a recent post in which he reminds us:

Absent a set of specific criteria, we will continue to direct the vast majority of our national security efforts against only one violent ideology (i.e., Muslim extremism).

The federal government has had a legal definition of terrorism for quite some time.

Title 22 of the U.S. Code, Section 2656f(d) defines terrorism as “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience.”

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) defines terrorism as “the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.”

 
By that measure most (almost all) of the terrorism we have experienced in the U.S. since 1865 has been the work of angry white men, not transnational Islamist extremists. There was a time when the federal government aggressively investigated the bombing of churches and the assassination of civil rights workers without regard to the skin color of the perpetrators or victims. Unfortunately, these days our frightened neighbors and their political representatives are not much interested in chasing anti-government extremists, white supremacists, anti-semites, tax protesters, violent homophobes, or “right to life” bombers and assassins, especially, it seems, if they happen to be white and nominally Christian. There is some tolerance for tracking down the tree-hugging arsonists, animal-loving vandals, balaclava-clad anarchists, but they’re radical lefties and probably atheists after all. I suppose it all depends on whose ox is gored, or what sort of news coverage sells the most advertising.

I look forward to reading Mr. Southers’ book.