WHY IN GOD'S NAME...???

The term "natural disaster" threads throughout the fabric of human history. There may be times we think of some friend or relative fitting the description, but that's gaming the language. Mostly it means violent physical phenomena laying waste to land and life.

There are spectacular examples like the 1883 Krakatoa earthquake which shook the entire Pacific southeast. Or China's 1931 Yellow River flood which drowned up to 4 million people. There are the less spectacular but even far more deadly disasters like Europe's Back Death in the 14th C consuming 25 million lives...China's 1950s famine costing 20 million lives...the Influence Pandemic of 1918 whose estimates reach 75 million victims worldwide.

That such natural disasters happen is a given. How we respond is relative to the when, who and where. Perhaps the most complicated part is the how. How we try to understand and live with such calamities. To be sure, the mind and heart of humanity do try! Must try!

Our gut reaction even finds its way into the gainful language of our insurance policies: "Act of god." Yet there are few religions that hold fast to the Ancient Greek and Old Testament divinities punishing mankind with malevolent thunderbolts from above. Rather, they seek to fathom the reason bad-things-happen-to-good-people. Indeed there are many profoundly comforting ones.

More and more, modern science has entered this arena with quantifiable facts of earth and sky which help intellectually explain what we victims find so inexplicable. This is seen as a quantum leap in deciphering ,for example, earthquakes like Vesuvius and Fukushima without reliance on earthquake gods.

Both religionists and scientists agree on this much. In nature there is a reaction to every action. When we mortals gather ourselves together to pick up the pieces and bury our dead, we too must each find a reaction by which to give meaning to the meaningless and purpose to the purposeless.

Enter the great literary minds whose talent is to weave the best of such reactions into their narratives. John Bunyan's PILGRIM'S PROGRESS, Thomas Gray's ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD, Thornton Wilder's THE BRIDGE OF ST LUIS REY, and....

...and anything you can find right now to grab on to that won't melt from your tears.

WHAT DO YOU DO WITH YOUR LEGENDS...?

"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend...!"

The classic movie line reflects the way history often comes down to us. Examples abound. Egypt's Cleopatra... France's Joan of Arc...England's Churchill...America's George Washington and the Cherry tree, the ride of Paul Revere, the Illinois days of Lincoln, MacArthur's & Patton's WWII exploits. And why not? So often we prefer -- need -- the legends.

However, legends are not only the property of the famous. The older we grow, the more little legends accumulate. First in our minds. Later at the family dinner tables. Eventually within the world we walk.

To some this becomes a straight-cut matter of facts vs fictions. These are the empirical, legalistic minds among us who live by "the evidence." An intellectual habit to be admired. At least until someone presents them with the "facts" that their college exploits were really never quite what their resume says, or their baby is actually kinda funny looking. Those are the moments when the efficacy of the legends by which we grow trumps the emptiness of the facts which we have worked to outgrow.

Of course our's is an age in which facts frequently become an obsession. Of the scientist, the reporter, the opposition party, the rival company, the nation. Facts for them are used like weapons to cut down the legends (read: lies) by the others. And yet these weapons can be painfully suspect. More than likely our facts are mostly our perceptions. Each scientist, reporter, party, company or nation sees only what it can or wants to. Until the Singularity, we are after all still human not computer.

Does all this mean we walk in a world of nihilistic relativism? where nothing is what we think it is? No. The earth is still not flat and north is still not south. However, neither is the earth exactly round nor north exactly true north. As Einstein reported, things bend and relativity co-exists with absolutes.

So there it is.

Facts and legend co-inhabit our world and our lives. To know the difference -- when and how to know the difference! -- just may be the most empirical lesson we can learn. Scientist, reporter, party, company, nation, and each of us.

THE 21st C UNHOLY COALITIONS

American director Woody Allen has this advice: "The Pentagon could use my wife's hormones for a whole new generation of biological warfare!" French poet Paul Valery has this advice: "The only way to let your dreams come true is to wake up!"

Woody is funnier, but Paul is wiser. Currently our world insists on living in its favorite dreams of movie magic and political pipe-dreams. Inside those felicitous domains, the world still looks as if it is somehow, some way, going to make it. I mean, it always has, right...? Even the grim-est of grim reapers have to grant this. Still, a few un-dreamy facts here:

* Currently 1.02 billion people (15% of the world population) go to bed hungry
* Currently about 1 billion people have a disability including missing limbs, paralysis, blindness, mental retardation, and major disease such as cancer
* Currently there are over 55 wars of some kind going on somewhere in the world
* Currently there are more than 22,000 nuclear warheads hidden somewhere in the world
* Currently the US leads the world in concentration of wealth: its top 0.1 % of earners take home more than 10% of the nation's personal income, with business executives leading the way with a 400% increase in salaries since 1970
* Currently in the US farmers in states like Georgia reflect a new trend: there they are still looking for 11,000 workers to harvest this year's crops, but they can't find any because of its new immigration laws; and even though the state unemployment rate is 10%, local residents are not applying
* Currently in the US 64% of workers are white collar jobs, while only 36% are blue collar jobs which make anything tangible

Now if random statistics like these read like omens, they don't even touch the most impending one: natural disasters. Today's dream-less experts like Al Gore stay up at night and see the 20th C as the century of ideologies, wars, and genocide, but adding the 21st C will be the century of natural disasters and technological crises. Especially unholy coalitions of the two (see Fukushima, Japan for frightening details).

To the dreamers -- well, have a nice day!

WHAT THEY MIGHT SAY....

This week -- 235 years later -- we are still proudly celebrating our independence. With fireworks, music, and most of all oratory. The audiences ohh, ahh, and applaud, for this is the day a great and noble experiment in nation-building was launched.

We might remember, though, there will be another audience on this glorious day. Only they can't ohh and ahh. They are the dead. The honored dead in all the honored cemeteries in all the states and lands on which they fell fighting so that this nation might still be here to celebrate.

So just a moment here between speeches to listen to what THEY might say.

They might say....please don't repeat the teary cliche "they gladly gave their lives for their country." Yes, we gave our lives, but not always gladly, for there is nothing about war and death that is glad. In our case, the first was forced upon us; the second, was rushed far too soon. Just like you, we would have wished to live, to celebrate there rather than here, to have had more time to appreciate this noble experiment.

They might say....but if there are to be other wars, let them at least be wars with a purpose as noble as the experiment. Wars for causes and crusades which have moral merit. Which are our leaders' last resort. Which are for the collective safety and welfare of our land and people, not mostly for the hubris and wealth of our rich and elite.

They might say....you there, the living, please pause as the trumpets and star-bursts fill the night sky. Pause and think deep enough to value what you take as a given: one more celebration, one more year, one more chances to get this thing right. Try -- harder than ever before because there may be less time than ever before -- try to save your flags and furies only for the ideas and battles that count.

They might say....we do have one advantage over you. Our struggles are over, our rest is assured. You, on the other hand, still have the gift and the burden of life. Please, for God's sake, use them better than we did!

THE WORLD IS SMALLER THAN YOU THINK

The news of the world is no worse than ever before. Just reported more hysterically than ever before. It's why they feel obliged to give us an occasional break. In the back pages of the papers and at the end of the broadcast there's always that little save-your-sanity item of good, maybe even cute, news.

And who can argue with these tasty desserts at the end of a bitter meal. Never mind the big bad news we've just met -- wars, terrorism, unemployment, financial bubbles, political corruption. Even the little bad news begs for a break -- congressional stexting, the Washington State woman who drove her SUV down a boat ramp and into a lake because her GPS told her so, or how about the California high school that just classified their yearbook as child pornography because it had a prom picture whose background included a 17-year-old boy groping a 15-year-old girl.

On the other hand...

Our news organizations aren't really the best source for our everyday sanity-breaks. Looking for a break, there's still the world itself. Right around you. If you know how to look. Here's my Top Ten looks:

* The fiery red sun seeping up through our backyard Maples in the early morning, reassuring me there is at least one more day to try. Try living, listening, loving.....

* The summer birds that come with the sun, tweeting that same symphony of nature which has been playing for a hundred million million sunrises

* The perfect music that is Mozart or Bach as I ease into the private rhythms of my morning breakfast

* The perfect cup of fresh-brewed coffee I musingly strive to make with each breakfast

* The little children who giggly populate summer mornings with their pursuit of butterflies and beatitudes

* The wind-caught hair of their young concerned mothers

* The liquidy whispers from the forested river nearby

* Our supermarket's astonishing produce department with all the succulent gifts of the earth in one space

* The Zorba Dance I hope to dance this day, having waited far too long to try

* Finally, this video: www.andiesisle.com/creation/magnificent.html

THERE IS NO FOREVER

Christmas and summer vacation are the child's first experience with joy followed by loss. The good stuff never seems to last. Then as we grow we keep learning the same lesson. Although maybe with some different images: The change of the seasons, the passing of those we love, the end of the world we knew.

Christianity has this way of making the lesson more bearable. Actually more embraceable. It speaks of Good Fridays always followed by Easter Sundays.

While it's easy to feel the regrets in our Good Fridays, not anywhere near as easy to envision the resurrections in our Easter Sundays. Still, those Sundays do come. Especially when you believe. Belief, though, comes hard when all around you keeps changing, disappearing, dying. A sinking feeling particularly felt as you age and accumulate so many more people and things you want to hang on to forever. But there is no forever. At least not here.

Right now, so many many Good Fridays. Plants closing...jobs disappearing...opportunities drying up. Old-time stand-bys like newspaper boys...milk men...librarians...gas station attendants...video stores...front porches and safe schools hard to find. Not to mention dining rooms...over-the-backyard-fence talks...house calls...teenage dating...labor unions...and the entire middle class almost nowhere to be found.

But here's the thing. Between Good Fridays and Easter Sundays we have the Saturdays during which to gradually let go of what's been lost, in the expectation of something better to follow. Quick fact check..! That isn't likely to take place cheering at some pumped-up-be-your-dream seminar or exhilarating at some tai chi group exercise or channeling your rage into some heady alternative like a Tea Party.

Most of the world's survivors have a much different story to report. First , you take the time to grieve what you lost, to value what it did for you, then realize what it failed to do for you. Now, but only now, can you look to Sunday as a new resurrection, a new beginning, a new new for which we've all been waiting even without always knowing it.

Sorta like the day I lost my heart to the Joan who had always been waiting. Even without either one of us knowing it.

THE NOBILITY OF THE NO

You have to get a little older to appreciate this. With age, something -- lets be bold enough to call it wisdom -- coats your view of your world. Instead of measuring your success and satisfaction by the number of plays, parties and events you can attend, you start measuring it by the number you don't have to attend. Known privately as the nobility-of-the-no!

If, for a candid moment, one can take their eye off the prize-of-power, it's entirely possible to draw some comparisons to one's country. As it ages, perhaps it too can ease into the nobility-of-the-no. No to the passion for power...the obsession with success...the need be number one...the demand to be first at everything...and especially the entirely unprovable premise that bigger is always better.

In the case of Americans, this thought is entirely and ridiculously counter-intuitive. I mean, what do you mean being anything but the best! Anything less than the most! Such thinking is downright un-American!

Yes it is.

But it once was for other great national powers too. Consider the fates of the greats of the past. Then consider how they have comfortably -- often joyously -- eased into the nobility-of-the-no to many of the challenges they once simply had to meet head on. In Europe alone we have the narratives of Greece, the ancient world's center of civilization, now the center of civilized memories...Italy, the great Rome, now the relaxed land of wines and tourists....France, the powerhouse of kings and Napoleon, now the warm magic of culture and Paris...England, the capitol of the world's largest empire, now better known simply for Shakespeare, London and charming country homes.

These were not necessarily national retreats. More like national awakenings. Awakening to the relaxed realization that there is something good about taking the slow road. About not seeing everything in life is a call to arms. About a nation wisely discovering what the adolescent tree-climber and adult deal-maker has discovered in older age...

...that it's perfectly OK to be second. Even third. Especially to stop breathlessly counting and start joyfully living.