Push The Button



OK, I've got a recommendation for people who happen to like that techno-electronic groovy music sort of thing, and it's this: The Chemical Brothers have just released a new CD, titled "Push The Button" which I think is pretty good.

I especially like the lead track and first single, "Galvanize," the third track "Believe" and #7, "Left Right" which all have relevance, IMO, to the themes that I have dealt with here in this blog and on the email list of the same name.

So check it out, folks! Unless, that is, techno/electronica just ain't your thing, which I can respectfully understand...

Oh Well, I Can Still Smile About It All 

Hooked Up and Ready to Go 

Stranded on Interstate 69 

Car Problems

The reason that I'm just today getting back to my computer, rather than yesterday, is that my 1993 Intrepid broke down on Friday afternoon, just as I was heading back home. That morning, I saw that the temperature gauge was running hotter than usual and had even hit the top of the indicator, setting off the dashboard warning light just before I pulled into the campus where the training was held. By the time we'd finished our final testing and certification process, and I was ready to leave, I was happy to see that the temperature had cooled off considerably. This bought me some time to head into Albion where I knew there was an AutoZone near the freeway. My idea was to replace the thermostat since I knew that sometimes these items can go bad and cause a car to overheat. I did that, and it appeared to have a positive effect, as the car once again resumed blowing out warm air and all seemed right with the world.

Much to my disappointment though, I saw the gauge rise again as I traveled several miles further down the road. I had just turned north from I-94 to I-69 and began looking for a place where I could pull off, an exit preferably, where I could roll into a service station or some other place with a decent waiting area. I would from there call AAA, set up a tow to a proper mechanic and go from there.

But I never even made it that far. In an instant, I saw the gauge needle fall from the top to the bottom of the thermometer, indicating that some mechanical condition had gotten radically worse somewhere under my hood. My "CHECK ENGINE" light came on and I realized that I wouldn't be able to travel any further. It so happened that just as I got to this point, one of those "Authorized Vehicles Only" shortcut lanes lay just ahead of me. So I pulled in there, thought momentarily about heading back south so that I could get closer to an exit I'd seen just back there that might have had some businesses where I could find assistance. But then it became clear that I'd found the perfect spot place to break down, as it allowed me a safe place to get off the freeway without being stranded along the shoulder. So I backed into an easy-access position for a tow truck and made myself comfortable.

Thankfully I had a cellphone which sped everything up, even though I had to wait on hold with AAA for about 12 minutes, which was a nuisance. Cutting through that waiting, eventually the tow truck guy showed up and hoisted my ailing car back into the fair town of Marshall, MI, to Bud's Towing Service. I described my predicament to the driver and he wondered if the problem was with my water pump. I've had cars with bad pumps before and I was wondering if this might have been the case. Arriving at the station, I made the calculated gamble to have the crew put in a new water pump, cost around $130 with labor, to see if that would get me on my way. Other possible causes would, I know, have cost me a lot more money, so I figured that this was my most affordable option to see if I could get the car fixed myself that same day.

Turns out that it wasn't the water pump. Oh well, I gave it a try.

The pump was replaced but the overheating continued after several minutes of continual driving. The grim truth was settling in - my car had a much more serious malady than my first wave of denial was prepared to accept. I glanced at the odometer and noticed it read 173,001. Like 173K signaled the expiration of the car's term of service or something. It was now close to 5:00 pm so I called my department head to let him know that I was likely going to have to stay another night due to car problems. (This is partly a problem for my employer too, IMO, since they didn't have a company car available for me to use even though the conference was around 100 miles away from home.) I also spoke with Julie to fill her in on the situation and I felt bad for that because I know she'd already had a super-busy and hectic week and that she had a lot of other things still going on - most pressingly, her role in helping to throw a bridal shower for our nephew Joe's fiancee on Saturday morning. Not to mention the financial implications of all this car stuff...

I won't be so tedious as to describe all the steps that we had to go through to get me and the Intrepid back home. The short version is that Julie's brother Jerry rented a car dolly, hooked it up to the back of his oldest son's pickup truck, and came down to tow us back to Grand Rapids. Julie's other brother, Laurin, is a great mechanic, raised as they all were on a dairy farm (no cows in the barn these days though), and he'll look over the Intrepid sometime next week to see just what's going on in there. We are concerned about a blown head gasket that's allowing air into the cooling system, but I'll wait to see...

Jerry was great though - all he asked of us was $20 to cover the gas money. It was kind of funny watching him and Julie squabble over the money - Julie was practically insisting that he take a few extra twenties and he just refused to take it. Called it a "late Christmas present." Even after Jerry got his way, Julie was talking about it on our way home, clearly bothered a bit that we didn't pay him enough for the favor. It kind of runs in their family, that humble strain. Much appreciated by me in these circumstances!

Anyway, I took a few pictures when the tow guy showed up so I'll post them here to create some visual context.

Back Home Again

Ah. At last. After a week away from my comfortable, familiar surroundings and relationships, I feel glad to be sitting back in my computer chair, with a lot of catching up to do and stories to tell.

The week went well for me as far as the training was concerned. I am now a lot more confident in my understanding of the Life Space Crisis Intervention, and feel reasonably prepared to take what I've learned into the work setting when I return there tomorrow. There is a big difference between doing the interviews in role plays with adult class participants and intervening with real children in crisis. In some ways, the role plays are more difficult because the interviewer isn't responding to "real" emotions and often the adult acting out the child's role doesn't seem to have a handle on how to accurately mimic the feelings or attitudes of a client whose behavior calls for a certain type of response from the interviewer. But of course, role plays are low-stakes affairs. One can do them and be reasonably sure that the "child" won't go off and hit somebody or something...

In any case, let me just say that my mind is full of possibilities and ideas that I plan to bring to work with me in the days to come. I'm in the process of becoming the all-around residential staff training meister that some have envisioned my job turning into, and it feels exciting for me to see this process unfolding around me. This training is a crucial component of that whole program and I expect that I'll be spending a lot of time reviewing and deepening my familiarity with this material so I won't spend a lot of time describing it here.

I have more anecdotes and things to write about but I intend to make them shorter individual, topic specific entries so this entry is now concluded.

Gone Trainin'

I would like to have written more but I just don't have the time. I'm heading off to Albion MI in a few minutes to begin a week-long training in the Life Space Crisis Intervention. I've already blogged about LSCI awhile back, so I won't describe it here or link anything. I just gotta go now, my daughter is waiting for me to drop her off at college, so for now, I'm just saying bye-bye and see you next Saturday, Jan. 29. Or maybe sooner if I find an internet cafe and decide to drop a note here and/or elsewhere in cyberspace.

Big Snow Dump

I spent some time this morning shoveling out our driveway after we were on the receiving end of a snowstorm that left around 8" of fluffy white stuff all over the place around here. It's still coming down, but I think it's supposed to ease up a bit.

Since the boys have their paper routes, our family is usually among the first to arise on weekends. Good, stout-hearted descendants of pioneer prairie folk that we are. (Well, not really.) Julie was a bit concerned about the twins driving themselves out to their delivery areas this morning, since they are going through their first winter with drivers licences, but there's hardly any traffic on the road and they don't have to travel very far, probably not even half a mile, to get to where they gotta go. So she was persuaded to let them drive without parental accompaniment. It was still kind of funny watching them back out of the driveway in snow so deep that it scraped along the bottom of our minivan. We have kind of a tight squeeze where it can be easy to bump the passenger mirror against the side of the house as you back down the driveway if you don't navigate it just so, and with a virgin canopy of snow covering the driveway, there's no marker to help get thy bearings. (Quoting an old Donovan song there.) So Brandon had to maneuver around a wee bit, and then they were on their way.

I had parked my Intrepid out on the street last night, in case I got blocked in by one of Julie's guests who came over for her monthly Creative Memories gathering. But I chose not to go anywhere last night, and forgot to bring the car in after everyone had left, so I had to go brush off mounds of snow and bring it into the garage. Since I was already out, I grabbed a shovel and began the process of clearing the driveway. It felt good to be out there, in the crisp, quiet morning, with meager but still appreciated sunlight battling its way through the grey obscuring mass overhead. After I'd gotten about halfway done, Julie came out to join me, working on the sidewalks and helping out a bit as we got to the end. As we shoveled and pitched, our neighbors began to emerge, spurred on no doubt by our fine, prudent example. Alas, it so happened that one of them had to spoil the midwinter's idyll by the corrupting noise of a gas-powered snow-blower. Within a few moments, the acrid smell of exhaust attacked our nostrils, obliterating the invigorating purity of the arctic winds that swept across the frozen landscape. For the sake of a few minutes time and a misguided pursuit of "convenience," the fellow across the street was losing out on the opportunity to reenact the life-affirming thrust-and-toss of the snow shovel, a ritual nearly as primeval as any known to our earliest hunting-and-gathering ancestors, certainly among the most noble and unifying common bonds that exist among us who dwell in the northern latitudes. What had begun as a timeless moment of contemplative toil had now been cheapened by the incursion of a tawdry suburbanite shortcut. With a last shove of the scoop across the landing of my driveway, I cast a derisive glance across my shoulder and headed indoors, to put on a pot of coffee in my autodrip machine and sat down to my computer to complain about how modern technology is taking the soul out of contemporary life.

Still, it would be kind of nice on mornings like this to have one of those gadgets...

Bush Inaugural

Here's an article I wrote the other night for the next Equity newsletter, a publication of the Institute for Global Education, of which I am a board member.

This article is being written on the evening of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, a time to commemorate and celebrate the remarkable achievements of a man and the movement he led to achieve justice,
confront racial discrimination and oppose violence. In just a few days, the noble sentiments associated with the memory of Dr. King will be eclipsed in the media by coverage of George W. Bush's inaugural ceremonies, a stark reminder of just how far our society has to go to align itself more with King's famous, oft-referred to but otherwise under-prioritized "dream."

It's been a struggle for me to clearly identify my thoughts and feelings regarding a second Bush term – I wrestle with a strong temptation to become apathetic or emotionally detached from the fact of his presidency. I'd much prefer to just get on with my life and not expend all that much energy on an irritant force in this world that seems in many ways so remote and unaware of my personal concerns and values. But it only takes a few moments of serious reflection to remember that a sense of resignation is almost exactly what the corporate and military power-brokers in our society would prefer as far as those who are not "on board" with their plans and schemes are concerned.

Many of us have had to work hard to overcome our sense of futility and revulsion as we've seen the values of peaceful, non-violent conflict resolution that we prize dismissed, disdained and disrespected in our media and by the conduct of our supposedly representative government. Given the steadily deteriorating course of events over the past few years, and Bush's talk of an ambitious agenda for his second term, it's understandable how one could look for some easy way out, a vain wish to make it all go away, to distract ourselves from the pain and frustration that are almost guaranteed to fill the headlines over the course of the next few years as a result of the elections of 2004.

Like many of you, my email inbox is never lacking for material that indicts the Bush administration of any number of misdeeds, whether the topic be war, the environment, human rights, civil liberties,
management of the economy, cultural tolerance or other areas where their priorities seem diametrically opposite to those we would set if we had access to such power. Given that I am in the midst of a busy life, with family and professional responsibilities that demand much of my energy and attention, I am often unclear and sometimes overwhelmed by the challenge of determining how to best respond to the on-going series of outrages generated by this government.

From January of 2001 until November of 2004, many citizens of the USA (and many more around the world) invested substantial hopes in the possibility that Bush would be repudiated and removed from office through the electoral process. Those hopes were dashed in the early morning hours of November 3rd. Whatever our opinions regarding the legitimacy of the final vote tallies, one thing that is clear is that the problem with Bush isn't merely that he promotes policies that we disagree with, but that he has a strong and dedicated following throughout American society. Though his winning percentage was relatively small, Bush and his handlers are not at all reluctant to behave as if they won by a great landslide. Given the zeal of his most loyal supporters, and the access his presidency grants to the most powerful and wealthy special interests, it's not all that surprising that Bush speaks and behaves like the "King of the World" or "God's Man in the White House." As bemusing or repellant as the spectacle appears to me and I suspect many Equity readers, we are left with little other choice but to acknowledge that, in the minds of many of our fellow citizens, George W. Bush is a bona fide cultural superstar. And we are left to find a way to co-exist in a world that has made this sorry state of affairs not only possible, but our reality.

As I consider the course that IGE will embark in the months and years ahead, I wonder openly if it is not in our best interests to maintain a calm, measured approach to the situation. Though Bush has long had the power to annoy, aggravate and occasionally infuriate me with his banal pronouncements (such as his recent "accountability moment" comments where he considers the 2004 as validation of his brutal decision to invade Iraq), I'm not convinced that a ranting, vehement
posture is going to get our point across to those who might otherwise be persuadable to join in broader cultural resistance to "Bushism." (And I think we are near the point where Bush's followers can be likened to members of a cult.) The fundamental challenge that I see facing the peace and social justice movement of our time is to focus on actions and interventions where we can make a positive, constructive difference in the eyes of supporters and skeptics alike. As much as I enjoy the opportunity to gather in protests and demonstrations (and I plan to participate in them when they happen!) we have seen that this tactic has had a limited effect on moving the broader public to challenge the Bush agenda.

We mustn't make the mistake of underestimating just how formidable the neoconservative, right-wing political machine has become, and how easily they are able to convince middle- and working-class adults that they are "on their side." We can and should continue to make the case against the current regime through the media and through conversations as we have the chance to confront the spin and distortions that so many of our neighbors are flooded with through TV and other sources. However, argumentation by itself won't change minds. It hardly needs to be said that the Right has generated a lot of its own media that basically serves its purpose to insulate the minds of their followers and deflect the points that the rest of the world is trying to get through their defenses.

So many of the problems and negative effects of Bush's policies take place "somewhere out there," outside of the immediate environments that many of us live in – particularly the busy suburbanites just trying to make ends meet and keep their families relatively intact and sane. Bush's followers are our neighbors, friends, family members, co-workers and fellow citizens – most of them fairly sincere,
diligent, responsible folks who have their own reasons for thinking that the president deserves their support and is doing the best he can in a tough job. Adopting a stance that ridicules or insults these
people may help us to vent some frustrations or even draw in a few converts from those who grow disaffected with the status quo. Refraining from such a response can be difficult, especially when we
see Bush supporters in the media and our daily lives freely indulging in such mockery of our principles and values. But our standards and priorities ought to be set higher than that. Each of us have to reflect seriously about the ways that we can "think globally and act locally" over these next four years – and beyond.

I have little doubt that there will be numerous opportunities to take bold stands and speak out in protest – we may even see Bush's second term overrun by scandals that spiral even beyond the control of Karl Rove and company. It would be a mistake, though, to either withdraw into a sullen dismissal of our civic responsibilities or to level simplistic inflammatory barrages of accusation against Bush and his crew simply to further polarize a social discourse that already is too prone to lapse into senseless shouting. The long-term mission of IGE and other groups who share our values is to appeal to that which is best and most hopeful within human nature. The challenge is clear and somewhat daunting – we have our work cut out for us, but in mutual encouragement and in efforts that open our eyes to what is really happening in the world around us, we will find the strength and the vision to persevere, even if we find our views and our hopes relegated for the moment to the "fringe" of popular, conventional wisdom. That may not be how we like it, but we can, and will, persevere.

Religion and the Secular Order

While I struggle with some writer's block, trying to come up with a brief essay for the next issue of Equity about the prospects of another four years of Bush as president, I discovered Google News and Google Alerts this evening. Here's an essay that was published in a Turkish on-line newspaper today that I would have never found if it weren't for Google sending it my way. It's written by Joseph Lawrence, a professor of philosophy from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcestor, MA.

A snippet to draw your interest...

"The distinction between church and state, which is often portrayed as an attempt to marginalize religion by making it into a purely private affair, actually grew out of the effort to preserve, in the face of the fierce competition between warring sects of Christianity, the freedom that constitutes the condition of true religiosity. What was crucial was the religious insight that religion imposed by political power is not true religion. A believing Muslim might want to add to this the observation that true religion must ultimately be universal religion: not only must it be freely chosen, but it must hold itself free of the idolatry that gives birth to sectarianism in the first place.

Once this point is thoroughly comprehended, we are able to see that the real issue is not what separates Christianity from Islam. Instead, it is what time and again intervenes to separate both the Christian and the Muslim from the truth of religion as such. To be precise, it is that human impulse towards idolatry which turns faith into its opposite: the dead literalism of the fundamentalist (whether Christian or Muslim; Jew, Hindu, or Buddhist). Fundamentalist fights fundamentalist, a continuation of the warfare that has always been engendered by idolatry (the contention that God can be either "mine" or "yours"). In contrast to the zealots who fight, truly religious people live with one another in peace and harmony, secure in the knowledge that the inner truth of religion is always one and the same. Because it is the truth of the Beyond, it can never be contained by any human institution. Where Christianity and Islam come together is where both yearn for a truth that is situated beyond their own best theological formulations."

Quiet Weekend

I'm still feeling kind of worn down from last week at work, and I have had to resist the temptation to call in just to see how things are going. I will find all that out tomorrow. No calls have come in to inform me of any "major" crises so I'll take that for what it's worth.

It's been bitter cold outside the last couple of days.

A rundown of what I did since Friday: After I got home from work, Julie left with her friend Laura to go work on Creative Memories albums. I stayed home and watched a documentary about the Sex Pistols titled "The Filth and the Fury." The Pistols were my favorite band when I was 16 and 17, which were the years 1977 and 1978, the years that the band became notorious over here in the States. They were a British phenomenon, mostly, and the documentary paints a vivid picture of the social squalor from which the group emerged. The Sex Pistols were profane and aggressive, rowdy and harsh, all in all a great rock and roll band, and I count it a unique privilege of my life to have been into what they were doing when it was all still happening. There are a lot of folks who jumped on their bandwagon after the fact, but I was their biggest fan at Alameda High School when everyone else was listening to arena rock or disco, and I was present at their final concert at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco. I got to see Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious up close, and that event was a pretty big influence in me eventually forming my own band (the Church Police.) I watched the documentary by myself because Julie would never sit through it, nor would she really understand why I would still be interested in their story, and I wasn't really sure that I wanted to invite my boys up to join me either. They were happy to hang out downstairs on the computer or playing the Nintendo.

On Saturday, I went to a draft counseling workshop in the morning where we discussed some ideas about helping young people establish Conscientious Objector status should conscription be resumed. Also we want to find some way to counter the one-sided presentation that military recruiters are allowed to give to high-school students without any balancing perspective from folks like us who think it's a bad idea to join the military, especially the way that our government is leaning these days.

Later I watched the movie "The Fog of War" which I found very valuable and fascinating as well. I wonder if Donald Rumsfeld will ever express his opinion on Robert McNamara's 11 lessons that he spells out in the film? As much as I dislike what America did in Vietnam and is doing in Iraq, there is something unique about our system that it would allow a man like McNamara, who is clearly a thoughtful, reflective, conscientious person, to spell out his ambivalences and emotional conflicts about the war on camera for friends, enemies and bystanders alike to see and evaluate for themselves.

This morning on the way from church to my mother-in-law's for a family get-together, we saw a Hummer dealership going up in flames, big black billowing clouds rolling up into the sky as firefighters beat the conflagration down in ridiculously cold conditions.

Then just now tonight we watched an old Orson Welles movie, "The Stranger," about a Nazi war criminal who had slipped unknown into the life of a small Connecticut town just after WWII. The villain, played by Wells, is obsessed by clocks, and the whole movie seems like an exercise aimed at getting him up into the clock tower for the climactic chase scene. But it's still Orson Welles which means pretty cool b & w cinematography, with Edward G. Robinson and Loretta Young also on board for some additional star power. Not a classic, but it was one of the cheapie DVDs my sister got for me at Christmas and I'm glad to have it in my collection.

Also watched a bit of football and the beginning of the Golden Globes before we put on the movie.

I should have done more writing or other creative stuff, but just wasn't feeling into it all that much. Still reading the LSCI book, which is really excellent material, very thought provoking and highly applicable to the current situation at work. So I think I'll go get some rest now and prepare for what is sure to be an eventful week ahead.

Dave and Chibi on a chilly January evening 

The Madness Continues...

I'm still pretty consumed by work today. I worked from 8:15 am until 7:30 pm today. We had another day of crisis on the unit. I personally was involved with four physical management (i.e. restraint) episodes, all involving one fairly large (6' 2", 200+ lb) girl. I don't like having to take it there, but she's a big kid, quite strong, and it just fell to me to do my part in this way. We are not quite out of the woods yet with her - we tried very hard to have her hospitalized in a psychiatric facility, but the system is deeply flawed - it took us hours to work through the various stages of assessments, approvals, voice mails, faxes, waiting for return calls, etc. And when we finally got approval from the powers that be scattered in their various offices around the state of Michigan, it turns out that the two local facilities that we wanted to place her in both refused her admission even though she met criteria. We are fairly sure it's a funding question - this kid is Medicaid funded and her county will only approve a low rate. Another place further away from here called us, gave us approval, but it was on a "now or never" basis - our staff called me at home, after I had left thinking we wouldn't get approval at all, to ask me what I thought about the offer. I told them to arrange for ambulance transportation and we'd go ahead and send her there for a respite stay over the weekend. But when they called back a few minutes later, they were told that the bed was no longer available and she would not be accepted there. The most ridiculous, petulant, unprofessional gaminess that I've seen in this profession in a very long time. I really cannot believe that another organization would honestly expect direct care staff to make that decision on the phone without even an opportunity to consult with a supervisor or administrator. But I am unfortunately used to working within the constraints of ineptly managed, financially strapped and misprioritized care-provider systems.

So I've not been able to do much emailing or really much thinking at all about stuff outside the sphere of my professional life. But I'm still committed to keeping this blog updated daily, so you can expect to see more from me here tomorrow, whatever happens.

One good thing though is that, despite all the physical intervention and the intensity of all the PTSD, bordering on dissociative behavior I and my colleagues had to deal with today, no one got hurt, and I can take some satisfaction at having "been there" for the sake of some very traumatized, hurting girls. I really hope and pray that we can help them find a better way to get through this cruddy stage and move back to some of the healthier coping practices that they've been learning about and using in weeks past. What's been happening this week is that we have this wave of ill-thinking, where girls are setting each other off and convincing each other to basically give up and not care because it's all just too much to deal with. We, and they, know better, I'm sure of that, but they are just giving themselves excuses and vacations, so to speak, from the work of recovery, healing and reconciling the wounds of their past and present lives.

OK, enough already, I gotta go watch some TV and chill. Have to go back to work and deal with it again tomorrow!

Insane Craziness

That's not really the best clinical language to use, but on a purely emotional, reactive level, that's pretty much how my afternoon at work could be described. This has been going on all week long, but fully erupted today. We had a pretty messy scene on our hands as four girls (or more) had mental/emotional breakdowns right after school, leading to some prolonged physical management, a significant staff injury (a cut on his head requiring stitches, and a few others who sustained various marks and bruises) and a whole lotta stress for everyone involved. There were four girls who had to be restrained, and a few others who had a hard time coping with all the turmoil that they stirred up in our home.

I won't begin to try and explain what it was all about, or how we had intervened up until the point that all the chaos broke out, but I can give reasonable assurance that it wasn't due to neglect or indifference on our part. We have very good, dedicated staff who are committed to working graciously with our girls and who put a lot of heart and energy into helping them through the healing process. But sometimes we stir up some very deep feelings, which trigger anxieties, which prompt behaviors, which get reactions, and before too long, we are in the deep weeds of some of the yuckiest emotional swampland that one would ever dare to venture into.

So that's how I spent my afternoon, in what was supposed to be more of a quiet administrative day spent planning out some training events for the other half of my job. I didn't get home until around 6:40 pm, and at 11:30 pm just now, I called to check in with one of our overnight staff, who had two girls up refusing to go to bed. So after getting the fill-in from her, I got on the phone with one of the girls who had been restrained earlier in the day, and I hope I was able to persuade her to go to bed and try to make tomorrow a better day. But just as I got back on the phone to finish up my chat with the staff, she told me she had to go because a loud thundercrack had just woken up eight of our girls and they were out in the hall way, scared and restless. Good grief, just what we don't need.

Thunder and lightning in Michigan in January?!?! Yes, I heard it too. Something wierd and sinister is going on. The weather is OUT OF CONTROL! (as it's always been, now that I think about it...)

L S C I (and other work-related mental congestion)

Not much time for blogging today. Work has gotten real busy again. We have a couple of girls who have been stirring things up on the unit over the weekend, including some highly disruptive shenanigans such as pulling the fire alarms after midnight, etc. A real bother! Requiring us to work extra hard to connect with them, and putting me in the position of monitoring how our staff are intervening and responding to such challenging behaviors.

Today was also pretty full because I had to lead devos and take notes at Supervisors Meeting, then chair the Assistant Supervisors meeting (which is part of my new Staff Development position.) So a lot of meeting facilitation in between trying to help in some small way to deal with the difficulties presented by some of our agitated clients.

On my mind through all this is the book I've been reading for work, "Life Space Crisis Intervention," which apparently costs nearly $60 on Amazon.com, but then, this is professional literature so I shouldn't be surprised at the extra expense. The conference I'll be attending the week after next week is dedicated to teaching me the skills outlined in the book, and once that happens, I will be thrust rapidly into a new phase of my own professional development as I will be charged with teaching these skills to all of the youth treatment staff in our agency. The veterans have already had this training, but require 3-hour recertification sessions each year. New staff require six hours of this material, so you can see how my work is cut out for me. I'll be leading these sessions at the rate of two per month, usually, though I'll be sharing the responsibility with my supervisor, so I will have some months where I'll only be doing it once. But then I'll get the Handle With Care physical intervention training in early March, which will complete the curriculum of trainings that I have to go through in order to teach those same skills to others.

It's best that I not think too much about this - I like doing it and am eager to take on the new responsibilities, but when I try to comprehend it all, it seems like just a lot of stuff to digest. So I'll be better off minimizing it all to a manageable degree. Otherwise, it gets a bit disorienting to think of all the stuff that I either don't know now or don't know as thoroughly as I'd like to, but still have to teach to others! That just makes for a bit of excitement in life, now doesn't it?

Anyway, here's a pretty good website that gives the rundown on LSCI if you are curious as to what that's all about...

PoMo Church?

I spent this morning at a worship gathering in nearby downtown Grand Rapids. It was at the Monroe Community Church, a small congregation that meets in rented warehouse space along the Grand River, just north of the main landmark buildings in town.

The reason I went there was that the Grand Rapids Press mentioned this church in an article that ran in yesterday's Religion section. The article itself only covered a different (but apparently similar style) gathering called Lighthouse Village, which meets just up the street on Sunday evenings. I happen to have met one of the women quoted in the article (she also happened to be in the photo accompanying the story) when she applied to work for my program back before Christmas. Just prior to the interview, she mentioned that she had spent some time that day at Barnes and Noble reading Brian McLaren's "A New Kind of Christian" (!) and greatly enjoyed it. That just about sent the interview off in an entirely different direction but I stuck to business and proceeded to follow the usual protocols. (As it turned out, we didn't hire her because we had a more experienced applicant. But we still might later on down the road - she is a good candidate, and her husband works in our organization already, but this is getting me way off-topic.)

The article was supposed to include material about Monroe Community Church, but it appears to have been edited out. Or overlooked, or something. But the church's website and meeting times were published in the sidebar, so I decided to see what MCC was all about.

I got there a bit late, not knowing exactly how to find the building. When I did, they were just nearing the end of their opening praise 'n worship singing time. They have a five piece combo (two guitars, including a youngster who uses some fuzztone and distortion which I found kind of amusing, a bass, drums, keyboard and two singers) and they seem to have the basic repertoire of choruses that so many "contemporary" style worship services favor these days. We sang "O Lord Our Lord How Majestic Is Thy Name" and "I Want To Know You" and other such numbers. The theme of the service was God's glory, based on the passage in Exodus 33 where Moses and God have a talk and it ends with Moses asking to see God's glory and God hides him in the cleft of the rock and walks by, Moses sees God's back but not God's face since none can see God's face and live.

The sermon was a classic 3-point where the movement of the passage is traced from Moses first asking for his own needs to be met ("who will go with me?"), then to the needs of the people ("what will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?" - what a request!!!) and then finally to God ("Now show me your glory.") The idea being that we tend to be self-centered, or at best, focused on the needs of people around us, but it's ultimately best to be focused on God.

What the practical implications of this are supposed to be, I'm not sure, but overall, it fits into the standard mode of "putting God first" which sounds great and in some sense is obviously better than "putting me first." But does "putting God first" or "focusing on God" really change our orientation, or does it mostly just make us more preoccupied with religion and all the activities that come with being an active part of a church community? I noted in some of the songs that they contained a lot of concrete imagery about God, about wanting to hear his voice, see his face, feel his touch, about his enthronement and power and glory, his triumphant superiority to all that is and all that the world has to offer. I may sound kind of hardened and skeptical by saying this, but how many of all these attributes that we sang about are to be found primarily in our imaginations?

What I mean by that is, what we read about in Exodus is really just a literary artifact of an encounter that we don't otherwise know anything about or have any evidence of. And in the telling of it, little concern is shown for the details of what may or may not have happened - instead, some broad generalizations are drawn from this ancient, and rather extraordinary, report to make it somehow meaningful to our current lives and situations. At one point, the pastor said that the world we live in isn't all that different from Moses' but I really disagree with that premise. A lot has happened since then, and I would say our thinking patterns and lifestyles are quite seriously different from those of people who lived three or four thousand years ago. Some characteristics still remain, of course, but there's just something kind of unsatisfying about reducing or failing to acknowledge how different our world is from that of the biblical writers. I know that highlighting these differences would make the preacher's work much harder and perhaps make it more difficult for many in the congregation to get into the message.

This was a group of mainly younger adults, people in their twenties, I'd say, with a few, just a few, people over thirty in the congregation. So the level of spiritual maturity and insight was, with all respect, a bit limited, and probably focused on some more basic levels of personal development, life management, etc. When the pastor asked us to write down on a piece of paper what we would ask of God, placing ourselves in Moses' position in the Ex. 33 account, all my questions were for clarity and understanding. I wanted to know about the ultimate purpose and final condition of the universe, whether there's any other intelligent life away from the earth, the reason that we have to endure pain, suffering and tragic loss, and other such matters. I didn't ask for my mortgage to be paid off or any other personal conveniences, advantages or prizes. This was presupposing that God could ever be said to figuratively "sit across the table" from me as he was depicted in the sermon, which needless to say never ventured into speculation as to how this dialogue between Moses and YHWH took place (audible voices? inside Moses' head? or was it perhaps a pious device that was used to personify and establish the struggle of Israel's valiant leader who struggled so mightily with his responsibilities to lead the nation through the wilderness?)

OK, I just don't think it's very nice of me to continue on in this vein because the people are nice and I'm certain that the church does great things for the people who are there and have committed themselves to this fledgling ministry. But if this is what pomo church is supposed to be like, I am going to have to continue my quest elsewhere. God can and will bless this fellowship in many ways, I'm confident of that, but I don't see myself as having much to gain or contribute from this kind of ministry. In any case, I will check out Lighthouse Village and see what they have to offer...

"But I still haven't found what I'm looking for."

ArenaCross!

I had another interesting cultural experience at the Van Andel Arena last night, doing the volunteer-concession-booth job that I've blogged about in months past. This time, it wasn't a musical event, it was a mechanical one. The occasion was an "ArenaCross" set of motorcycle races that kicked off a weekend full of sprints featuring young men and children who send their shrieking buzzing bikes hurtling around a dirt track and soaring through the air as they hit a few ramps and bumps along the way.

I won't have as much to say about this as I do when I work the concerts. For one, the crowd was pretty small last night (between 2500 and 3000 in an arena that can squeeze in up to 12,000 with seating on the floor.) Don't get the impression that this kind of entertainment simply isn't popular in Grand Rapids. On the contrary, one reason that the numbers may have been down is that there was competition across town, where the Monster Trucks were in full roar over at the DeltaPlex (the same cavernous warehouse where I saw Pearl Jam last fall.) So it was a tough choice for guys and families whose idea of a good time is to sit breathing exhaust fumes belched out by engines revving at full blast so that large hunks of metal (and the humans who operate them) can dash, smash and/or crash at thoroughly unnatural velocities, for entertainment's and competition's sake.

It is curious to me that these events would go head to head with each other. We do have numerous weekends to choose from throughout the winter for this sort of thing, you know. But be that as it may, I wasn't at the Monster Trucks so I have nothing further to add about that. I did find it worth a passing mention though to contemplate the crowd that comes to ArenaCross.

It was mostly a country-ish, Caucasian, right-leaning crowd. Prior to the commencement of the racing, not only the national anthem but also "God Bless the USA" (the Lee Greenwood hit) was sung. And most if not all of the winners of each race (that is, the older guys, the teenagers and young adults) gave thanks not merely to God, but to Jesus Christ for blessing them with the skills to win and a safe ride. Still, that's not to say that this was a "puritanical" crowd. There was a certain contingent of folks who gave us a lot of business in the beer sales department. One guy made three separate trips to my register alone to buy two beers and a jumbo hot dog ($15.75 total.) He was so quick to wolf down his food that I saw him eat one hot dog before he even made it back to his seat (making it all the easier to carry two cups of beer.) He was, needless to say, a big fella.

The most fascinating detail of the evening for me was to think about the time and dedication it must take to reach the highest level of competition in this sport. I have to give credit to the young guys who drive these bikes. They are strong, skilled, disciplined and good at what they do. I just wonder what it is that they find so compelling about the sport. I can imagine the thrill of flying on your bike through the air would be quite a rush. But what is it about spinning about in a tight little spiral like they do, and the hazards of piling up your bikes, breaking a few bones, compacting your spine, etc. Does anyone warn these kids of the risks? I saw a lot of riders in the concourse limping and hobbling along - guys too young to be saddled with debilitating conditions, but it seems like they've been bitten by the racing bug and are gonna stick with it as long as they can.

The racing extends all the way down to elementary grade levels as well. I saw one raise where the winner was seven years old! Of course, the bikes are a lot smaller and the jumps are pretty scarce compared to the big boys. But I am not sure if these are all local kids or if there are grade-schoolers who go out on a semi-pro bikers tour? Though I have some nephews on my wife's side who like these kinds of motorsports, who've even done a bit of bike jumping out on their farm, and my sons have a friend who did a lot of outdoor biking with his dad (before the dad was killed in an accident out on an open field, where he ran into a tree and his son had to go run for help, only to return too late... a pretty tragic event, obviously) - I'm not really tuned in to what it is that would get a family so turned on to this kind of activity as to make the significant investments in motorcycles, uniforms, accident insurance, practice time, etc. that it takes to turn an ordinary kid into "Johnny Blaze, ArenaCross Champion!"

ArenaCross continues throughout the weekend, but I'm just as happy that I didn't sign on to work tonight's event. I was actually pretty bored for a considerable stretch, since business was slow and all I could hear from behind the counter was engines buzzing and a young announcer trying to whip the crowd into a frenzy with his high-pitched exclamations. Towards the end of the night, I was able to take a break and watch a little kids race and a couple of bigger kids races. In one of the older class competitions, I saw what looked like a nasty pile-up at the bottom of one landing zone, where a kid had his own and somebody else's bike actually laying on top of him for a few moments. He sustained some kind of injury to his right thigh, and was seriously hobbled as he tried to get off the track. They never stopped the bikes to allow him to clear out safely; instead, he had to wait for breaks in the traffic so he could crawl across the track to small niches where he was relatively free from the risk that another rider would crash into him. He tried to stand up a coupld of times, but couldn't quite make it. Finally, he got to a small hill and sat there until the race ended. I guess you have to be a real toughie to make it in that game. Seems a little on the crazy side for me. But no one, other than the usher I was standing next to, appeared to have a problem with it.

Well, that's probably way more than most readers of this blog need to know about my opinions of ArenaCross!

Back to Politics (momentarily)

Tomorrow is the day that the Electoral College is supposed to be certified, and when this process gets going, we will see just what sort of a challenge is presented by Congressional representatives to the outcome that produced a Bush victory and a second term for his administration. There are numerous representatives who will challenge the results on the grounds of voter suppression and perhaps even fraud, but the key is, will a Senator join them to make the objection count for something more than just a rhetorical pose? As we saw at the beginning of Fahrenheit 9/11, in 2000 no Senators were willing to commit themselves and so Gore wound up gaveling himself out of contention.

Earlier today, I got an email from John Kerry (a mass message, of course) where he stated that he would not join the objection. Here's his quote:

"Tomorrow, members of Congress will meet to certify the results of the 2004 presidential election. I will not be taking part in a formal protest of the Ohio Electors.

Despite widespread reports of irregularities, questionable practices by some election officials and instances of lawful voters being denied the right to vote, our legal teams on the ground have found no evidence that would change the outcome of the election.

But, that does not mean we should abandon our commitment to addressing those problems that happened in Ohio. We must act today to make sure they never happen again."

I wasn't particularly moved or impressed by his message. It just seemed kind of cold and passive. If he's not willing to make a big deal about this, I'm not sure why I should get all worked up about it. That doesn't mean that I am not concerned, or that I am not going to take any action to support voting reform. It's just that I find his appeal kind of lame. Dropping an email in my box is not the same as getting your face on TV and telling the public that you are disgusted and dismayed by the gross injustice that many voters have suffered without hope of any remedy as far as this year's election is concerned. Who really knows what the final accurate tally would have been in a well-run election in Ohio? It's nice to think that four years from now, we will have more confidence in the vote. But our objective this year was to vote Bush out of office and Kerry failed to deliver on the hopes, energy and money that so many of us invested in him. He let us down, and I want him to go full force to at least slow down the Bush agenda. So far he seems to be more interested in remaining safe and comfortable. That's not exactly what I was looking for in an alternative political voice to the current arrangement. So yeah, sure, I'll call Frist and Hastert... when it's convenient, when I get around to it. For all the difference it probably won't make.

OK, I've gotten that off my chest, I'm ready to go back to focusing on more immediately important personal matters again...

Technical Difficulties

No, not with my blog or my computer. I'm helping my boys handle some breakdowns to their favorite electronic gadgets. Last night, I was in the middle of watching a training video for work (taking notes in order to transcribe them into a useful handout for staff to review - I'll blog on that some other time) when Derek came down to me, his voice slightly quivering. He informed me that something terrible had happened to his new Nintendo DS, the hottest hand-held video gaming system to come out in recent years - a transcendent leap forward from the GameBoy and all its subsequent upgrades (which we have several of underneath beds and in drawers all around our house.) It seems that the DS had been left sitting on the floor next to one of our sofas and when he went to play it, there was this ghastly crack in the upper LCD screen. It didn't break the surface, but was internal - it blotched up the picture pretty badly even though the system was still functional enough to allow for game play. Still, this was no way to utilize the amazing features of the DS system, a platform so new that most of the best games and abilities of the unit still remain unexplored by the games currently on the market.

Clearly there's no homemade repair that could address the remedy, and these suckers are scarce - maybe not quite as rare as they were several weeks ago (the big chain stores are advertising them again in their Sunday flyers) but really we don't want to shell out another $150 in any case.

So Derek got out his paperwork and I called Nintendo Customer Service. I spoke with a wonderfully helpful woman who unfortunately didn't pronounce her name so clearly for me to catch it and I didn't really want to make her repeat herself so she remains anonymous. But she took my call quickly and arranged for us to send it in so we will get a new unit (or at least a replacement screen) free of charge! since the unit is so new that they haven't even decided on what a repair cost would be for damages such as ours. (My conclusion is that someone stepped on the top of the case, since the screen goes all squishy when one presses on the aluminum skin.) So we have the FedEx and Nintendo repair numbers (ungainly long jumbles of letters, numbers and even asterisks) and we'll box the puppy up and send it back to its spawning grounds tomorrow afternoon, expecting the parcel to return within 6-9 business days. I thanked her profusely for her excellent help and cheerful manner, and after I hung up, Derek and I just smiled at the reassurance that things don't always turn out to be as big a bummer as they possibly could have.

Then just a few minutes ago Curt told me that he's going to return his iPod which is a bit older than the DS, but still covered by warranty. Apparently his batteries aren't holding their charge very well. Plus he secretly knows in the back of his mind that the iPod has evolved another generation since he purchased the model he currently has (not a full upgrade - "iPod 2.0" - actually iPod 1.4 according to the text on the website...)

And there's the annoying problem of my DVD player which will randomly black out its picture every so often, sometimes just minutes into a program, sometimes an hour in, sometimes not at all for the length of an entire movie. But that item is two years old and perhaps on its way down to the basement TV if this nonsense keeps on happenin'.

Dave and Julie Blakeslee smile in another New Year - Welcome, 2005! 

It's a bit late, I admit, but I'm just getting around to experimenting how to include more photos in this blog. So here's one of my children opening their stockings on Christmas morning. 

Believing What We Want To Believe

Here's a Leonard Pitts column from a week or two ago that I got via email on another list. It asserts that for most of us, it's not the facts of the matter that counts, but rather how it affirms or challenges our pre-existing biases.

I post it here because I think it has something valuable to say to those of us who have strong opinions on matters of religion and politics and wonder why it's so difficult to persuade others who see things significantly different from us to shed their "erroneous" beliefs and acknowledge the truths that seem so self-evident to us.

One interesting point to consider - the local newspaper (my hometown Grand Rapids Press) ran the column o its editorial page, but left out the sentence in FULL CAPS found toward the end of the piece. It seems that they were reluctant to allow their readers this moment of self-awareness when we realize just how selective and self-serving our reading habits tend to be. Maybe it's a bit too risky in the editor's view to induce that sort of reflection in the general newspaper reading populace?

(column begins here)

A question for my Republican friends: Would you still love George W. Bush if he were Bill Clinton?

Seriously. If it were Clinton who had invaded Iraq based on erroneous intelligence, Clinton whose decisions had led to the deaths of more than 1,200 troops, would you be foursquare behind him the way you are Bush? Would you still support him even as he is vilified by half the country and much of the world?

And for my Democratic friends: Would you have felt the same about Clinton had he been Bush?

Had it been Bush who had an affair with a White House intern, Bush who looked the nation in the eye and lied about it, would you have been so willing to forgive? Would you still have opposed removing him from office?

In other words, are you guilty of double standards and outright bias?

I'll save you the trouble: Yes.

That's not what our self-image says, of course. We like to see ourselves as principled types who sift the facts before forming an opinion. But for most of us, this is pure poppycock. We are perfectly willing to ignore any fact that contradicts what we believe.

Maybe you already knew this intuitively. Now you can know it to a scientific certainty.

For which you can thank Drew Westen. He's a professor of psychology at Emory University, author of a new and still-unpublished study testing whether people make decisions based on bias or fact. Bias won hands down.

In a key scenario, respondents were led to believe a soldier was accused of torturing people at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The fictional soldier claimed to have been following orders from superiors who told him the Geneva Conventions had been suspended. He supposedly wanted to subpoena President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to prove his case. Respondents were asked if he should have that right.

Some were presented with strong "evidence" corroborating the soldier's story. Others had only his word to go on.

But the strength or weakness of the evidence turned out to be immaterial. Researchers were able to predict people's opinion over 80 percent of the time based simply on their opinions of the Bush administration, the GOP, the military and human-rights groups. Those who had less affection for the president sided with the soldier even when the evidence was weak. And fans of the president tended to side with him even when the evidence was overwhelming.

We believe what we want, facts be damned.

"The scary thing," says Westen, "is the extent to which you can imagine this influencing jury decisions, boardroom decisions, political decisions ... "

I'm reminded of a colleague of mine who says we Americans increasingly seem to embrace separate "truths," reflecting not objective reality, but political orientation. SOME OF US EVEN GET OUR NEWS EXCLUSIVELY FROM THOSE SOURCES THAT AFFIRM OUR TRUTHS. He calls it living in alternate realities.

It's because of that separateness that there often seems to be no moral center or intellectual coherence to much of what passes for public discourse these days. Our principles are situational, our willingness to marshal critical thought goes off and on like a light switch. We'll believe — or not believe — whatever it takes to win the argument. Winning it is all that matters.

And never mind that it's possible to win the argument and still be wrong.

Westen laughed when I told him I found his study depressing. If there's a silver lining, it's the 15 or so percent of respondents who actually bothered to consider the evidence when forming their opinions. We'd all be well advised to follow their example.

Forget what you want to believe. Seek the truth and have the courage to believe that.

Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr.'s column appears Sunday on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is: lpitts@herald.com

Copyright 2004, The Miami Herald

Year's Beginning

Today got off to a slow start, even though I was up early. We got home from our friends' house (the same family with whom we've spent New Year's Eve for probably the last four or five years now, maybe even longer) around 2:00 am, got to bed around 2:30, then up at 7:00 am to get the boys on their way to deliver the papers. I helped Derek with his route, and we got back around 8:30 to walk into a kitchen boasting the warm aromas of fresh coffee and homemade waffles. Yum! Julie did a nice job putting together a tasty holiday breakfast and we all enjoyed the good food.

Since it's Saturday, I decided after breakfast to watch some cartoons, so I got out my new Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol. 2 and watched most of the second disc (of four in that set) which featured mainly Road Runner shorts. It's kind of intense watching 10 of these in a row, but such a deep immersion allows one to more fully appreciate the nuance and development of the series, including the progressively abstract stylizations of the Western Desert environment that the Coyote and Road Runner performed their slapstick ballet. But eventually I got very sleepy and wound up falling asleep on the sofa for about an hour or so. I'm usually not much of a napper, but I couldn't help myself and I needed it. And I didn't have a whole lot else going on, so I napped.

From there I kind of moseyed around the house for awhile, before deciding to plunge into a project I've been putting off for too long - updating my household budget and reconciling all my financial records. I'm not entirely done, but I got quite a ways caught up, and that feels good. It's the kind of thing that makes sense to prioritize on New Year's Day. So significant progress was made in a domestic management responsibility. Meanwhile, Julie and Alyssa took down the Christmas tree.

The rest of the day was spent basically putzing around. We had some "Family Game Time" upstairs just awhile ago, but the enthusiasm level was only so-so. Basically, nothing all that dramatic, important or interesting happened that's much worth relating here anyway.

But I have a few other things to mention. One is our new choice of after-dinner reading. I got out an old book by Tom Sine titled "Why Settle For More and Miss The Best?" It was written in 1987 and basically aims to get us thinking about our life's purpose, steering us away from materialism and consumerism, but also not going down the path of moralism and piety as an alternative. Tom Sine is an evangelical from the Sojourners/Tony Campolo camp. I looked up the book we'll read on Amazon and was surprised to find that the book is only available used (I had expected it to be out of print) and the cheapest copy (of four) listed was $29.00! So it must be somewhat collectible... I had no idea! But I think the book will be a good one for us to go over as a family, and I think it will be suitably balanced between the kind of devotional topics that Julie prefers and the more hands-on progressive, thought and conversation provoking material that I enjoy for wrapping up our family meal times. (Yes, we are one of those increasingly rare families that makes an effort to eat dinners together in the evening as often as possible, and we're usually able to do it, at least five or six nights per week, sometimes all seven.)

I'm also coming to grips with how demanding my new job responsibilities are going to be as I get into the new year. It's going to require me to focus my thinking quite a bit on what I want to present in the various trainings I've been assigned to give. My free time options will probably not be as numerous or as broad ranging as my natural curiosities would normally take me. I have to streamline more of my recreational pastimes into the kind of disciplined thinking and "professional approach" that is expected of me. I am not unhappy about this change - I like the idea of "maturing" as I grow into this new role. But I'm going to have to address my habits of just "hangin' out" and being loose and disorganized in my downtime, just because I feel somewhat entitled to do my thing when it's my day off. Between the job, finances, getting the twins into college and a host of other considerations, I'm going to have to focus up and stay in good mental and physical shape if I want to do all the things I've gotten myself involved with at a reasonably high level of performance. Which may mean less time for emailing and website doodling...