Entries in Life

Four years ago, during the last presidential election, I was working like a busy bee on the Clark Campaign in Little Rock, AR.  It was there that I met dcm — a relationship that took me around the world to Rwanda this year.  He gave me a bike sticker: Fight Terror! Ride a Bike!

Four years later, gas prices have doubled or so and, at almost $4/gallon, we’re beginning to think of new ways to avoid using oil.

Last year, before gas prices became really uncomfortable, I bought an old beater of a VW Jetta from Eric.  Still, gas mileage on it is almost twice as good as that of our minivan.  (And I’m sure if I ever get the hang of shifting properly, it’ll be even better.)  It has become our go-to car when we don’t need to take everyone with us.

And, still, there are times when we can avoid using any gas at all.  Today, for instance, I had my semi-annual dentist appointment to get my teeth clean.  The dentist is eight miles away.  What to do … what to do …

Ride a bike, of course!

This past weekend, I upgraded to a road-bike.  The inexpensive Redline Conquest.  With some slick tires to replace the knobby ones it comes with (because I’m not into cyclocross) and clips to replace the clipless pedals (I may be a bike dork, but I ain’t changing my shoes to ride a bike), I felt like I was flying down the road compared with the effort-to-speed ratio on my older city bike.

So, I biked to the dentist.  Sixteen miles round-trip.  About half a gallon of gas.  Almost two bucks saved.

I’ll make this bike pay for itself yet.

if I didn’t use oil to heat my home, I’d wish oil prices went up faster so I could ammortize the bike that much quicker.

(My daughter’s God father is starting to take the train to Harrisburg and looking at folding bikes.  At $140 for a month of rides on the train vs a 45 minute commute and four gallons of gas, the car really does begin to look less attractive.)

Χριστός Ανέστη! Αληθώς Ανέστη!

Христос Воскресе, радост донесе!

Christ is Risen!  Truly He is Risen!

Yesterday was Pascha, Orthodox Easter.  After 40 days of fasting and living like vegetarians, we came home from Church Sunday morning — and by “morning” I mean it was 1 AM when we got home — and had a nice roast lamb.  Then the kids popped in a Mary Poppins video (after The Hogfather, the movie I wanted to see, scared them too much) and I promptly fell asleep.

Check out this fun Pascha song from Serbia. “Christ is risen, and brings the joy!”  (Father Stephen has the translation.)

I’ve let myself get flabby. It’s time for a personal programming project. Something with Javascript, graphs, and some digging through piles of statistics. Maybe even something that doesn’t rely on Perl/PHP/MySQL. Now that would be a change!

Wow! If you read my posts on Orthodoxy, you know I often point to Father Stephen’s weblog. Since his post three days ago — a little ontology lesson on why Hell isn’t real — he’s gotten 115 comments (five more now that I hit reload on the page). He does have a sizable readership (in the thousands), but nothing else has generated this much discussion. I suppose this comment in his first reply is about as clear as you can make it:

Literalism is the bane of Scriptural understanding. Not that there aren’t plenty of “literal” things described. But many times we have to push beyond the literal to arrive at the truth.

So, I didn’t get to visit the gorillas, but the reporter for this story saw them. What caught my eye, though, was this description of the Gorilla’s Nest Lodge where we stayed:

That evening, as the sun was setting over the valley, the gardens of the Gorilla Nest Lodge resounded with drums and chants. In the magic of an African sunset, the garden exploded with sound and movement as a troupe of dancers rushed on to the lawn. There were lithe young men in long wigs resembling lions’ manes, exuberant young women and beaming little girls in white Communion-style dresses. As they performed traditional Rwandan dances, they tossed their heads, gyrated, twisted and jumped with ecstatic abandon, to the accompaniment of a hypnotic chant that echoed long after they had gone.

I should point out, If you’re interested in the stuff I write about here — Orthodoxy, Rwanda, Emacs, Linux, etc. — I’ve got a few link over on GotNoBlog.com. Why there and not del.icio.us? Because I want to do something useful with the domain besides let it be turned it into yet another empty site of spam. And this use (link and comment) it is similar to what I first saw the name GotNoBlog suggested.

So, I didn’t get to visit the gorillas, but the reporter for this story saw them. What caught my eye, though, was this description of the Gorilla’s Nest Lodge where we stayed:

That evening, as the sun was setting over the valley, the gardens of the Gorilla Nest Lodge resounded with drums and chants. In the magic of an African sunset, the garden exploded with sound and movement as a troupe of dancers rushed on to the lawn. There were lithe young men in long wigs resembling lions’ manes, exuberant young women and beaming little girls in white Communion-style dresses. As they performed traditional Rwandan dances, they tossed their heads, gyrated, twisted and jumped with ecstatic abandon, to the accompaniment of a hypnotic chant that echoed long after they had gone.

I should point out, If you’re interested in the stuff I write about here — Orthodoxy, Rwanda, Emacs, Linux, etc. — I’ve got a few link over on GotNoBlog.com. Why there and not del.icio.us? Because I want to do something useful with the domain besides let it be turned it into yet another empty site of spam. And it is similar to what I first saw the name GotNoBlog.

I’ve neglected you for a long time. Google Reader says there are over 200 things I haven’t read. I haven’t been twittering like I should. And my Facebook profile is left woefully out of date. But at least I’ve been getting eight hours of sleep.

As many Rwandans say, forgiving is an effort that one makes in order to make life livable, especially since victims and the ex-prisoners have to live together as neighbors again. (— from Reconciliation still a major challenge

Rwanda has too many guilty people for “classic justice” — it just “didn’t meet expectations”. Classic justice is having trouble dealing with the hundreds of thousands of genociders that will show up in court. The guilty and the victims are everywhere. So Rwanda has implemented public confession, after a fashion, in the form of its Gacaca courts. Confess, and your sentence will be reduced. Still, as the quote above hints, it isn’t always easy. Victims and perpetrators have to live next door and they can be a danger to each other.

Describing the experiences of living in the same communities, some survivors said that despite having forgiven and reconciled, they found it hard to look each other in the eye.

Tonight, after confession, my priest told me “Confession is easy, relationships are hard”. I immediately thought of this article. Confession, giving voice to your sin, seems so easy, but we have to do it so often. Screw up, confess. Screw up, confess. Repeat ad infinitum, it seems. Because confession is so easy and does not, in and of itself, mean change, it is nothing compared with going back and reconciling with the one you wronged. When I’ve hurt my wife, she isn’t satisfied that I’ve gone to confession. She wants real change. When the man who killed your family confesses to his crime and has his sentence reduced or forgiven completely, you aren’t going to be satisfied when he moves in beside you. You want real change. (And probably, if we’re honest, some “classic”, retributive justice.) Confession is easy. Reconciliation is hard.

Ok, I don’t follow the news-cycle much, but evidently people were yammering about Obama being an elitist. I gotta hand it to Jon Stewart, though. This is some good editorializing:

I know `elite’ is a bad word in politics, and you want to go bowling and throw back a few beers, but the job you’re applying for? If you get it and it goes well? They might carve your head into a mountain. If you don’t actually think you’re better than us, then what the **** are you doing?!?

Any mention of Rwanda seems to evoke the Genocide there fourteen years ago. Since then, we’ve had at least a couple more (Darfur, Kosovo), but before Rwanda, there was Cambodia. Dith Pran, the Journalist from The Killing Fields said on his deathbed: One time is too many. Genocide pops up in the strangest places. Reading this travel account of a couple of Jewish backpackers in Germany is telling. It starts out easy enough.

There was a great divide between my generation and the ones that had lived through the Holocaust. It was their identity. To me, it was a history lesson.

But ends with this haunting image:

Near the exit was a beautiful bronze sculpture that read, “Never again.” Beyond the sculpture sat fifteen orange tents. There were fifty Rwandan refugees sitting in the dirt and cooking lunch. There was a cardboard sign in front of them with the words: “You said never again.“

Is Dith Pran’s dream impossible? Will we always have genocide? I don’t know. I’m pessimistic enough to think that people will always suffer from irrational hatred. I suspect that the institutional intolerance that Rwanda is currently using is not the right way to get fix the problem in the long term. Now-a-days, Rwanda sacks officials for believing the wrong thing. It may work for now, but as long as people continue to believe the “genocide ideology“, it won’t matter if they lose their jobs, the beliefs persist and people will continue to elect people who think the wrong thing. Here we are, sixty years after the end of WWII, and Germany still hasn’t managed to cleanse itself of racists. I suspect it takes something more subtle. And it takes more time. There is one comment on that last link, though, that gives a note of caution: “He who says he knows the way, does not know the way.” — Lao-Tze