Gratitude--Pranked & Flummoxed

All this superb September, I have been working at cultivating a characteristic I lack—gratitude.  For starters, trying to be grateful for the gorgeous weather we have enjoyed most of the month. Rain when we needed it. Sunshine and moderate temps the rest of the time.

Most years, recent ones at least, we have had a hard freeze by this date. But the garden is still giving carrots, broccoli, leeks, and there is still basil for pesto.

Weather gratitude is a tough slog for an old atheist, though, because it requires an God. I was further sabotaged in my efforts, when somebody took my good bike out of the front yard.  A week later, one of the city workers brought it back. A prank—he found it in the park.

While I was in Colorado, my back-up bike (Rita Kauder’s old Schwinn) disappeared and was also found in the park on top of the vending machine. I looked along the roadsides in the ditches and the creek back of it. Thanks to Dagwood who recovered it—I am very grateful to you and Marty Hoffman.

Nonetheless, my gratitudinal (!) efforts are largely flummoxed by these pranks and my deep conviction that someone who does what is right by the environment, whether or not it has personal benefits, ought reap the reverse—respect not pranks, which, honestly feel like ridicule.

Sad Scenes aside. . .

At dinner last night several people were lamenting the plight of Syrian immigrants in Hungary and a small boy drowned off Turkey. Maybe because I don’t watch TV, but read or hear my news, I miss the essential pathos of these stories.

Therefore, I cannot dispel nagging questions like: Why are/were so many Middle Eastern, Islamic countries--not only Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Bashir Al Assad’s Syria but countless others—dictatorships? Is there something inherently paternalistic or non-democratic that requires a strongman to hold a state with variants of Islam together, to keep civic order?

Were you flabbergasted watching the Egyptians endure the misery of revolution; then around and vote for the Muslim Brotherhood, only to find themselves back where they started? What does the endless, intractable standoff between Israel and the Palestinians tell us?

Is there some correlation between the corporate Islamic mindset and public life that leads an essentially undemocratic place? Has everybody forgotten the Charlie Hebo affair? What happened to Theo Van Gogh?

Living in Germany and France I found Europe a saner place than here for its sensible gun control, reasonable (3-month) election campaigns, social practices and other public policies. There, you are less likely to get a county clerk taking it upon herself to defy federal law because of religious principles.  

It goes without saying that modern society means porous borders. What scares me about Islam is there seems to be more of that Kentucky clerk tendency in it, and I can’t help but think the influx of that to a saner place as problematic for the future. Sad scenes aside.