Coping, Today

I don't know if this says something about my own nature, or whether it's something more or less inherent in the modern western world we live in. But the truth is that I honestly cannot remember the last time I felt the contentment that goes with feeling that everything's done which needs to be done.

My work days end with dozens of in-progress tasks, all with very urgent deadlines, that aren't yet completed. On a given day, I've probably made progress toward completing some of them, but the moment one small duty is completed, two more have popped up to take its place. Contracts to negotiate, schedules to be approved, budgets to be created, initiatives to be launched.

At home, there are always garden beds to be weeded, siding to be patched, carpeting to be replaced, floors to be refinished, leaky faucets to be repaired, kids to be counseled, trip reservations to be made.

It can all be a little overwhelming and crazy-making, especially when I get seduced by the wish for an end to chaos.

So my method of coping is this: Rather than aiming for permanent Completion of Duties, I simply give myself a small moment of private recognition whenever I've done something that is helpful in any way. Days are generally full of these small opportunities, ranging from opening a locked door for an employee who needs access to a studio, to approving a check request, to making a decision for somebody who needs one, to answering a question from a consumer who calls with a problem. At home, pulling a single noxious weed is helpful, changing the bag on the vacuum cleaner is helpful, so I take note of that small act of helpfulness.

Generally, this means small celebrations of what I CAN do, and little time spent thinking about what I WISH I could do. Focusing on the process of life rather than a goal.

That's in my better moments. In more difficult ones, I still long for a perfection that is far beyond me.

Never what it seems....

In the above-street pedestrian skyway system of downtown Minneapolis over lunch today, I found myself following behind a young woman, whose appearance begged to be described as "sharp" in every scary sense of the word. I'm not sure if the word for this style is "punk" or "goth" or what, these days; but her hair, dyed jet black, was spiked in spear-shaped shards. Her lipstick and nail polish was glossy black, and rivets and nails and safety pins and railroad spikes seemed to pierce most every bit of exposed skin. The tattoos that covered her neck , upper back and arms were the stuff of horror films: dragon's fangs and barbed wire and thorns. Black leather and black denim comprised her wardrobe.

As she passed through one of the doorways over the skyway tunnel over 5th Street, her right hand balled into a fist and she punched the handicap button that opens the door automatically for disabled folks.

Aha, I thought to myself. Another spoiled young person, too damned lazy to even open a simple door for themselves.

But then I saw coming toward us a elderly pair riding single file in motorized scooters. Clearly husband and wife, they were almost certainly in their late 80s or 90s, and they now aimed their rides toward the door that had opened magically for their passage.

The scary girl didn't even acknowledge the old folks as she strode past them with hobnailed boots, but both the husband and wife each gave a small knowing smile as they rolled past toward the door she had kindly opened for them.

Reality is rarely exactly what we think it is.

Space Exploration

This morning on the bus ride into downtown, a young man took the seat next to me. He was munching on a large, chocolate covered sweet-roll with one hand; in the other hand he was thumbing through a novel. Not just any novel, but a graphic comic-book novel with bright, violent colors. In his ears were audio earbuds, through which MP3 music was audible, even to my failing hearing. At one point, the young man even took a phone call, removing only one of the earbuds to talk, while continuing to eat and to read his comic book at the same time.

It was a voracious orgy of sense fulfillment, and I both admired the young man's ability to juggle so much data, and was worried for his mental well-being.

His was an extreme example, but in this young man I recognized a pretty common human urge. As a modern culture, if not as a species, we seem to be intent on filling up all available emptiness and space with sensory stuff. I cannot even use a public restroom these days without also reading advertising placed at eye level on the wall above the urinal.

Because we are so intent on filling up every empty moment, every blank space, with excitement and sensory input, we might logically conclude that humans have some inherent nervousness and fear regarding openness and space. We're told that a large percentage of Americans are now so uncomfortable with silence that they use television and radio as sleep aids. If modern humans don't hear the voice of God, it may well be because they've chosen to distract themselves with Muzak instead.

This speaks, I think, to a certain existential uneasiness we have about our own identity. It's the information flowing through our senses that gives us an illusion of concrete solidness, and we force-feed ourselves all this experience, all these sights, all these sounds, all these tastes, to reassure ourselves that we do actually exist. Our deepest fear, I think—the one underlying all the other forms of nervousness—is that we don't truly exist. If we keep the forms flowing fast enough, we can fool ourselves into thinking otherwise.

And so one of the very biggest moments in a spiritual practice comes when we finally run up against the inherent spaciousness of existence. This seems to be a necessary stage no matter what spiritual tradition you practice. Some Christian practices place a supreme value on "surrendering to God," which is a metaphor for recognizing the relative insubstantiality of our "selves". In the various eastern traditions I have studied, there comes a point when the practice inevitably discovers a certain kind of emptiness or hollowness that is quite jarring and disconcerting.

For example, ever one I know who has had a serious meditation practice speaks of coming to a time when the quiet, relaxed seeing-of-things-as-they-are reveals that things we once viewed as solid and concrete are in fact extremely fluid and ever-changing. It's certainly not all that hard to recognize that emotions, thoughts, beliefs, feelings don't have any material substance, and it's not all that long that you begin to recognize that even the things you regarded as physically solid, such as mountains and boulders, exist solidly only within a split second of time. Nothing is genuinely real in terms of permanent solidness; everything is in motion, at all times.

Lots of meditators will acknowledge that this is a point where they're forced to work through a time of despair or even depression. After all, we turned to spiritual pursuits in the first place in order to transcend the temporal, to discover something eternal. What we discover, instead, is that nothing eternal exists, whatsover. Form is the most fleeting of all things, and we begin to feel that we are being devoured, evaporated by this spaciousness we didn't really want to see. The very first intimations of this can be extraordinarily shocking. The rug gets pulled out from under you entirely, in a way that can feel quite devastating. Lots of people even talk about a physical feeling of vertigo, a sense that they are falling, when they glimpse the true spaciousness of things.

But then, if you begin to experiment at resting in the spaciousness, the fluidity, you begin to sense that it is within this spaciousness that genuine awareness, genuine freedom exists. You are falling, yes, but there really is no ground that is going to shatter you when you hit. You begin to have moments when you begin to appreciate the ocean, because you are no longer fighting waves. When spaciousness and fluidity are the matrix, all things become possible.

Ever so gradually, you learn that the antidote to pain isn't to grasp for the shore of a particular island, but to swim freely among all the islands.

Suffering is largely the process of trying to make things solid, when their inherent nature is spaciousness.

The Ridiculous is the Sublime

On many levels, I'm something of a misanthrope. About 90% of modern culture is of no interest to me whatsoever. I think that People Magazine may well be the scourge of modern humanity, and at a social gathering this weekend, when most everyone was talking about how fabulous it is to live in the city, where there is plenty to do at all times, I quietly thought to myself that I could very easily spend the final years of my life in some mountain hu, honing mystical exercises until the bears eventually find my dying corpse and decide to devour me.

Ah, but the 10% of modern culture that I do like...well, that's the little slice of the pie that leaves me in complete awe of this strange, tortured, quaint, divine and demonic creature we call humankind.

Recently, Apple corporation released the newest software release for the I-phone, and though I didn't bother to upgrade to the fancy 3G phone itself, the software update is enough to convince you that humanity is both the most ridiculous and the most holy of creatures.

For those of you not in the know, several months ago, Apple opened up the source code used to create applications for the I-phone to just about anybody who wanted to tinker, and the result is that upon the official release of the new phone and software, several hundred applications already existed. Many were free; others are available for fees that range from .99 to $49.99. You download them to the phone, and thereafter they are free and clear for use anytime, anywhere.

For a week now, I'm stunned by both the silliness and the incredibly ingenuity of what I've seen. First, some silliness:

• One application requires you to do nothing more than hold down an lighted button on the screen of the I-phone. The game is to see how long you can squeeze the damn thing. It does nothing other than this, whatsoever.

• Another application displays a little miniature light-saber from star-wars. When you sweep the phone through the air, it makes that throbbing electronic laser sound from the movie. Silliness personified.

• There is a "flashlight" application that does nothing but cause the phone face to glow brightly. This is to help you find your keys in the dark, supposedly.

But there are a remarkable number of applications that are stunning both for their inventiveness and their usefulness.

• I am currently reading Thomas Wolfe's classic novel "Look Homeward Angel" in completely comfortable fashion on the I-phone. I downloaded it for .99, and find it a whole lot easier than carrying a 2-pound novel in my backpack on the daily bus ride.

• In an application called "Pandora" (utterly free), you tell the I-phone what kind of music you like (either a single song, or an artist), and it then creates a virtual radio station that selects songs in this genre. I've tested this on walks, plugging the I-phone into my car stereo, and plugging it into a cordless dock which I use to play music when I'm gardening, and the application works like a charm in any circumstance. There are no commercials whatsoever, and the only "hook" to it is that, should you happen to like a song you hear, you're allowed to tap a button on the face of the phone to download it permanently to your system for .99.

• Another application lets you speak a verbal memo into the built-in microphone on the I-phone. The verbal message is instantly whisked off to file server somewhere in cyberspace, and a moment or so later, a written transcription arrives back at your phone in the form of a memo. I generated a grocery shopping list in this fashion over the weekend; dictating it verbally, then using the written list as a guide when walking through the store.

• AOL radio is an application that lets you select from among hundreds of commercial radio stations nationwide. Should you want to listen to the Boston REd Sox baseball game, for example, you can instantly find a Boston station to listen to.

• An application called Box Office instantly produces theaters, showing times, and reviews of all movies playing in your area. And should you happen to not know your zip code, another button instantly pinpoints your GPS location, then spots all movie theaters in a 5 or 10 mile radius. Should you be hankering for, say, a barbecue restaurant, you can also use this feature to find all options, and then plot a turn-by-turn route to your destination.

And finally, my favorite...."Zen" turns your I-phone into a miniature sand-and-stone zen garden. Your finger both places small elegant stones, and serves as the rake to sweep the sand into soothing parallel lines. Should you like what you see, you can click a snapshot and save the image for use as a screen-saver.

Truly, it is the best of times. And the worst of times.

Alone at the Movies

The Rolling Stones weren't the main sound track of my youth, but they were certainly the flip side of the 45.

Red Wing, Minnesota, population 12,000, was the booming metropolis of my boyhood, and it was a reach for me even to get there. My home was seven miles south, deep in the countryside, but in the summertimes, I would sometimes bicycle, or sometimes catch a ride with a neighbor, or my dad, if he had errands to run, to hang out at the municipal swimming pool at the city park near the Mississippi River.

The swimming pool staff broadcast the twin cities radio stations through the megaphone-shapd loudspeakers mounted on tall poles, and it was here, between the ages of 10 and 15, that the Rolling Stones sang in the background as I came to adolescence and watched girls gradually develop into young women,summer by summer, glistening in the sun.

For some reason, the memory that's most vivid is not inside the pool, but sitting outside the fence on a park bench, pleasantly tired and drying in the sun, listening the music and oggling girls--including the one I would marry in 10 or 15 years. The girl-boy flirtation for the day was already over, and I would sit outside the pool and think about what was to come. To this day, no Rolling Stones tune ever plays without me thinking about bikinis.

This was the late mid to late 1960s, and a lot of the big hits of the Rolling Stones weren't even recorded yet. On the radio not too long ago, my daughter was surprised when the announcer identified "Paint it Black" as a Rolling Stones song, and was even more surprised by "Ruby Tuesday." These, though, were the songs of my boyhood, along with "Street Fightin' Man." We were, I think, still a couple of years away from "Satisfaction." I know that I was, anyway.

I was much more a Beatles guy in those days, but the Stones did appeal to the anarchist in me, which was brewing even then. By the time I reached high school, though, I would have already started to favor mostly folk rock singers--Cat Stevens, Joni Mitchell, a bit of Bob Dylan, Crosby-Stills-Nash-Young.

So the Stones will forever be mostly associated with the summer swimming pool, and particularly with the image of my future wife's freckles disappearing under the edge of her bikini top.

This week, after a long and hard week of work, and with my wife on a school trip to Costa Rica until Monday, I took in Martin Scorcese's new documentary of the present Rolling Stones, called "Shine a Light." It's a film much like "The Last Waltz," Scorcese's tribute to The Band filmed some years ago.

It's a pretty interesting time capsule, and it offers an entirely acceptable image of time passing and all of us growing older. Musically, the band isn't quite what it once was, but for all of that there is something reassuring about the image of these 60-something wrinkled men still joyfully performing this music of my youth. Filmed in a smallish New York theater, what is most striking is how readily the four band members shed all the baggage of being THE ROLLING STONES, and just become what they always were at heart--a pretty good blues-bar band with an extremely mesmerizing front man.

Make no mistake about it. The Stones were always Mick Jaggar's band, and nothing has changed. Scorcese is clearly fascinated by the timelessness of Jaggar, and unlike your views of Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, you would be hard pressed to seem much difference in the physical performance of Jaggar now compared to 25 years ago. It's only the deeply cragged face that gives away his age.

These are now old men, and it's perfectly all right. They ask for nothing except a place to play, and it's ever so clear how much they still like the music. The hit tunes are done a bit on autopilot, but the film becomes quite poignant at those moments when the band reverts back into the blues tunes which began their careers. The high point for me is a rendition of the old Muddy Water's tune "Champaign and Reefer," in which Buddy Guy joins the band, while Jagger plays harmonica with skill we forgot he had.

Juxtaposed against the current concert scenes are old television interview clips of the various Stones, most taped in black and white. Yes, Jessica. We once had television that wasn't high def, wasn't even color.

So in case you haven't figured it out, this is my enthusiastic thumbs-up film review. Shine a Light. Just like a young girl should.

Clever, clever gadget

If ever there was a timepiece perfect for the Buddhist, or the non-demoninational nihilist, this is it. Check out the

WATCH.

Citizens of 4F

subbtitle: Straight Eye for the Gay Guy.

Thomas and William get on the northbound 7:12 am 4F bus about five blocks apart. They are aging gay men in their mid 60s, of modest means. They clearly know one another, though I don't take them to be close friends. It is perhaps simply that they are acquainted from years of riding the same bus, or perhaps they have mutual friends in the neighborhood. They converse with smiles, but without the closeness of good friends.

I judge them to be gay mostly because I perceive in them a kind of superficial precision of appearance and style that I associate with gay men, a precision that I, like many men, secretly admire. There is perhaps just a bit of the effeminate in their speech and hand gestures, but it is a subtle thing. They are not politically, stidently gay.

Thomas has the appearance of a modern monk. The color pallet of his clothing is always in browns and cream colors. He has a carefully clipped gray beard, and a circle of brown-gray hair floating around a bald spot on the center of his head. He always wears a calm smile that never seems to vary, no matter what the circumstances. No matter how hideously slushy the spring morning, Thomas is always—always—immaculately neat. I have no idea how he accomplishes this.

William has something tenderly comical about his appearance. His badly worn shoes are always polished to a sparkling gleam. Oddly, he wears an expensive knit cap pulled down so low that it hides his ears, but the edges of the cap are very carefully folded twice, in opposite directions. It is a clear fashion decision, one that might have worked just a bit better on a younger man. William wears an earring in one ear, highly unusual in a 65-year-old man who is not Harrison Ford. William's trousers always have a carefully pressed crease down the front.

They are both gentle men. Gay gentlemen have it a little easier in the modern world of modern women, for it's my observation that when a gay man leaps to his feet to offer his bus seat to a women, it is rarely interpreted for anything but polite etiquette. Young professional women, in particular, sometimes resent the inference that they are weaker; but this resentment seems to be quickly set aside if the man offering the seat appears gay.

Mostly what I admire about gay men is their fluency with personal style. William and Thomas are men of extremely modest means, yet they find quiet elegance and satisfaction in the simple acts of good grooming and maintaining their clothing. There is nothing trendy about their wardrobes, yet they somehow look far more stylish than I'll ever manage.

Some time back, I realized during an important board of directors meeting that I had dressed that morning with a sweat sock stuck to the inside of my sweater vest.

On my very best days, I wouldn't even be allowed in the land of metrosexuals.

It's why I generally prefer the wilderness.

Tramps Like Us....

My head is a little numb today, the result of spending hours at a rock concert last night. Unexpectedly, a work colleague had four tickets to Bruce Springsteen, which I gobbled up in a flash.

It was the sixth time I've seen Springsteen in concert, though there was a lapse of more than 20 years since the last concert I attended. Raising kids and building a career sort of got in the way for a long while.
My brother, my 21-year old son, his friend and I went to the St. Paul event, and none of them has seen Springsteen before, and had no idea what to expect. I myself was 21 the first time I saw Springsteen, and the crowd last night was largely made up of my peers. I heard many of them talking about seeing Springsteen in the 70s.

The band was a full hour late taking the stage, and I worried a bit if this indicated the Springsteen might have lost his respect for audiences. Like other long-time rock acts sometimes are now guilty of, would Springsteen go through the motions in a prefunctory 45-minute set, in order to catch an early plane to Milwaukee, where he plays tonight?

I need not have worried. The concert lasted a solid 2-1/2 hours, and there were times when the band, loud as it was, was drowned out by the 45- and 50-year old audience singing along with the lyrics.

From time to time I glanced over at my son and his friend, to see them looking about awed at this songwriter/musician's hold over the audience. At any given moment, when Springsteen holds a microphone into the air, 19,000 people will bellow out the lyrics. While this goes on, Springsteen looks around at his band members and shakes his head in emotion and amazement. At one point last night during Born to Run, the crowd held all the lyrics for a full two minutes. Behind me was another father with a fifteen year old daughter, who kept looking around at the crowd, giggling with delight.

At 58, Springsteen no longer leaps off the pianos, but his energy still would put most 20-year olds to shame. His fondness for audiences is legendary, and there isn't a moment when you don't see his delight. He's become steadily more political in his old age, and last night there were moments of celebration that we're coming to an end of "8 years in the dark ages," and an admonishment to protect our civil liberties against illegal wire taps. We were asked to donate to a midwest food shelves charity set up in the lobbies.

Mostly, though, we were just flat-out entertained by an event where the audience is every bit as important as the performers. It is hard to know exactly how Springsteen manages to put so much of his soul into every performance. Six times now, and they mark the six best concerts out of dozens of different rock concerts I've seen.

On the way home, my son's friend said, hoarsely. "So, I suppose that must be pretty much what it was like back in the days of the Beatles."

Not quite, I thought to myself. But it will do. It will do.

Have a Drink, Miss Kelly

Naturally, I'm disappointed and outraged over the spectacle of another prominent politician betraying the public through his arrogance and lack of moral control. And I really don't like the fact that New York governor Eliot Spitzer is a democrat. Republican vice amuses me; democratic vice disappoints me.

But the whole hooker-gate event does raise a somewhat academic question in my mind:

What can a call-girl possibly do for you that might be worth $4,300?

Some years ago as I was dining alone in a hotel bar in Vegas, a stunningly beautiful woman approached me and after a naive few minutes of conversation, she offered to do whatever I wanted, for hours and hours, for the sum of $400.

Rest assured that there are many, many reasons such an experiment did not then, nor is ever likely to, happen. Performance anxiety, cheapness, and yes, that pesky moral character make me one of the most boring men in America. A mildly flirtatious woman makes me blush furiously. You can imagine my reaction to this event.

But I now confess to wondering what in God's heaven a man might purchase for $4,300. I ask myself what might coax me to consider such a tryst for this kind of fee—assuming I had that kind of loose cash laying around.

First of all, I can tell you that certain credentials would need to be met. To start with, the professional lady would need to be the spitting image of Grace Kelly, from the era of "Rear Window."

And there would be certain educational requirements to be met. Certainly a master's degree in comparative lit or religious studies from a prominent college, followed by a PhD in debauched sensuality from Anais Ninn University. I like a good conversation in between workouts.

And for $4,300, I'd think I'd be entitled to a 24-hour-a-day libertine adventure for at least two weeks. I'd insist on a contract to that effect.

I told you I was cheap. And I have high expectations.

Good News...and Bad News

Just when I had fully relaxed into my middle-age status, a complication arose.

Today, an extended survey I found in U.S. News & World Report told me that I'm not 52.3 years old (my chronological age) but rather that I have a REAL age of 46.3 years.

I truly don't know what to do.

This computation is based on an elaborate, multi-page survey. Wanting to know the complete dirty truth, I was fully, brutally honest, even. I was forthwith about my weight (which is fine if I was 6 ft. 3" tall; unfortunately I'm 5 ft 8"), and about the fact that my cholesterol and blood pressure are just a touch on the high side, though not so much that I need medication for it.

I was ruthlessly honest about the red meat I eat, and about the fact that I do no weight-training workouts whatsoever. I truthfully indicated that I have a nasty sweet tooth. I 'fessed up to my occasional insomnia, my allergies, the arthritis beginning in my feet.

I was honest about every last thing they asked.

But it appears I have enough healthy habits to more than compensate for these vices. I clicked the smallest option for number of alcoholic drinks per day (I'm more like one drink a week, much less per day). I walk somewhere between 20 and 3o miles a week. And my fondness for cheeseburgers is apparently neutralized by the nuts, grains, and vegetables I happily eat.

Now, although it's not a terrible thing to actually be younger than I am, it does leave me with a dilemma. I was very much looking forward to the senior citizen discounts I technically become eligible for when I'm 55 years old. Just what am I to do in 2.7 years? I don't lie easily, and if I say 55, when in reality I'm 49, I'm sure to get busted.

And now, do you suppose I'll have to send back my AARP membership card?

Age-old Mystery Answered

To the south of us, 23 miles, of the very suburban fringes of our region, there is a movie theater with a monster screen--at the end of this multiplex is a gargantuan 600 seat screening cavern with a movie screen so large you can barely take it in.

My wife and I are seriously addicted movie buffs, and so whenever a new "spectacle movie" opens, we'll travel down the interstate to the monster screen to see it. There is no way, for example, we will see the upcoming Indiana Jones sequel anywhere else in Minnesota.

Nothing truly good was playing this weekend, so we went down to see "10,000 BC," which just opened.

Much to my amazement, the movie actually answered one important historical question that has been haunting scholars for many, many years. Just how, exactly, did the Egyptians manage to construct the pyramids with their limited technology?

The answer has now been given: they harnessed woolly mammoths, imported from the northern tundra, to gigantic sleds that hauled the massive stones up ramps.

Lord in heaven, ladies and gentlemen, you have never seen such silliness on a movie screen in all your life. In the year 10,000 BC the neanderthals wore dreadlocks and somehow managed to trim their beards into neat fu manchu styles. Some neanderthals had already learned to harness and ride horses. From northern Europe, the sands of the Saraha were but a week's walk away.

("Sure," my wife said. "The continents were all pushed closer together then, don't you know.")

The giveaway that this film might not be historically accurate came in one bit of dialogue:

"Take care in this jungle," said one wise old neanderthal to his young ward. "For this unholy place is teeming with computer-generated saber-toothed tigers the size of greyhound buses."

Citizens of 4F

On the 7:00 pm southbound 4F bus the other night, three young black men, strong and tall, boarded at Hennepin and 5th St. in downtown Minneapolis just as night was falling. At the end of rush hour, the buses are no longer densely packed, and this one had a few empty seats and no one was standing.

A number of white passengers tensed noticeably when the young men boarded. Time was that Minneapolis was just a large small town, but no more. The town has its share of racial tension these days, and for many white citizens, young black men traveling together is reason for nervousness.

White women sitting near the front of the bus drew their knees together and clutched bags closer. Some of the white men frowned, their lips pressed in tight lines. The three young men were clearly Warriors, and this unsettled the middle-class white folks headed for the southern residential neighborhoods and the inner tier suburb to the south.

Much as I wanted not to, I also felt a bit of unease when two of the young men sat close to me on either side of my center-facing seat, and the third sat directly across from me. They literally towered over me.

Like virtually all fear, though, its reason for being evaporated almost immediately upon clear seeing. These young men were indeed Warriors, but it was because their black stocking hats proclaimed it. Their "gang" was the DeLasalle high school basketball team, and it appeared that the three had simply been having a bit of fun downtown after school before going home. They talked quietly among themselves, joking about their coach and basketball practice. Their eyes were dark and beautiful, and each young man had that faint haze on the upper lip, common to all boys who aren't quite old enough to shave.

"Your coach, is he a real hardass, or is it just his coaching act?" I said to the boy sitting next to me. There was a moment of dead silence; they were, I think, surprised to hear me talk to them. Then they laughed warmly and told me some stories about their basketball coach. They seemed genuinely tickled that this middle-aged white guy would eavesdrop on their conversation and talk to them. It doesn't happen all that often, I imagine.

They began to talk about their physics class then, and I respectfully left the conversation, since I had no desire to be obviously stupid in front of 17-year old boys.

The young man across from me was carrying a small shopping bag from the Hallmark store, and I wondered if under the flowering white tissue paper there was a gift for some sweetheart, or perhaps a sister or his mother. A sheet of paper peeked up out of the bag, and I saw that it was a job application. In addition to being an athlete- scholar, the young man was looking for a part-time job.

The three young black men left the bus on 46th St., and I heard several of the passengers sigh and give reflexive laughs of relief.

It's a pity they hadn't really seen these young men.

Christian Taliban?

Mona Dobrich, an orthodox Jew, grew up in Sussex County, Delaware——frequently the only Jewish student in a predominantly Christian school district. It was quite common for Mona to quietly endure school programs and meetings that began or ended with Christian prayers, and for the most part she had no trouble with this. Most of her schoolmates at least accepted her, and she fully understood that she was a very small minority in this culture.

But as Mona's daughter, Samantha, grew up in the same school district, Mona became increasingly uncomfortable with a Christian religious atmosphere that was growing mor and more intolerant of other beliefs. And when, at Samantha's high school graduation, a minister's prayer proclaimed that Jesus was the only avenue to truth and salvation, it occurred to Mona that this wasn't exactly proper, and might not even be legal, strictly speaking.

Mona wasn't some kind of strident social agitator. Her response was a quiet and proper request to the local school board that future public events of this type feature a more generic and less exclusionary prayer element. She didn't want to do away with the religious element, just make it more universal.

But news of this quiet request leaked out, and soon the atmosphere of Sussex County, Delaware was full of angry, even hateful language on local talk radio, in the local newspapers, and at school board meetings.

Unbelievably, strident Christians viewed this request by Ms. Dobrich as an infringment on their rights of religious expression.

It was after hundreds of local people showed up at a school board meeting to protest Mona's simple and reasonable request, with shouts and cruel personal attacks, that Mona took the courageous next step and hired a lawyer and filed suit against the schol district. Another family, who has chosen to remain anomymous, also joined the suit.

The jihad began.

Death threats and personal attacks on the Dobrich children made it necessary for the family to move away from Sussex County, although the husband, Marco, stayed behind to work in the same job and protect the family's health insurance.

The family did try to reunite in at one point, but some boys came into the yard, pointed at son Alex, and announced that this was the boy who had "sued Jesus."
The Dobrich's then moved away from Georgetown for good, however the increased cost of living in a larger city eventually required the older daughter, Samantha, to drop out of college.

While discussing this story with friends and neighbors, I have run into a few people who believe that the Dobrich family got exactly what was coming to them. America IS a Christian nation, I've heard, and anybody who can't get on board deserves whatever they get.

To which I always say the following:

If things were ever to change...how would you feel if a high school graduation ceremony required you to kneel on a prayer rug, bow toward Mecca, and praise Allah.

If this would be fine with you, then I suppose it's also fine to praise Jesus at a public school event funded by public tax dollars.