I Swear

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Here in North Carolina an appeals court just ruled that a Muslim woman can proceed with a lawsuit claiming that she should be allowed to swear to tell the truth on the Quran instead of the Bible.  As you can imagine this is causing some consternation among the locals, and it’s making for some nice debate.  Over at the Greensboro News & Record Doug Clark makes this point:

This is an important case about an old tradition, or ritual, in our
courts. I think there is continued value in asking witnesses to swear
their truthfulness upon a sacred text (or affirming their oath if they
prefer). But the practice is meaningful only if the text is held as
sacred by the persom making the promise. If that’s a Quran, or the
Hebrew Bible, or some other holy text, then so be it. Our law should
not bestow authority exclusively on one above the others.

I have to say that I agree with Doug’s point.  I mean how logical is it to ask someone to swear the truth on something they don’t believe in?  Doesn’t it give them license to lie?

In my role on the Lewisville Zoning Board of Adjustment I get to hear "cases" along with the other board members.  In our training we were told that we function pretty much like judges in a court of law; our job isn’t to offer an opinion on how properties should be zoned but rather to interpret whether or not the zoning laws are being met.  Whenever we hear a case we have witnesses who either support or oppose the proposed project and we have to swear those witnesses in.  Most do swear on the Bible but in one case we had a lady who said that it went against her Christian beliefs to swear on the Bible so she was able to simply affirm that she would tell the truth.  Her position was a new one to me and I wasn’t sure what she was talking about until I came across a comment from Cara Michele on Ed Cone’s blog about the Quran case.  Here’s what she wrote:

"Again, you have heard that it
was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not break your oath, but keep the
oaths you have made to the Lord.’ But I tell you, Do not swear at all:
either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; or by the earth, for it is
his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King.
And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white
or black. Simply let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No’; anything
beyond this comes from the evil one."  — words of Jesus in Matt. 5:33-37

If the Bible is your sacred text, then you’re not going to swear on it.  (That’s assuming that you’ve read it.  And if you haven’t read your sacred text, well… what are you waiting for!) 

And if the Bible isn’t your sacred text, then swearing on it is basically meaningless anyway, right?

Irony.

Interesting, huh?  Personally I’d be fine with moving to a non-sectarian affirmation of truth across the board.  Perjury is perjury whether you swear on the Bible or on a stack of X-Men comic books, so why not make everyone’s lives simpler by simply requiring witnesses to say "I promise to tell the truth"?

On a lighter note, this reminds me of a moment we had last year when we (the ZBOA) couldn’t find the Bible and we ended up using the town attorney’s PDA Bible memory card for the swearing in. I couldn’t stop thinking that it was an act of faith for us to believe that the memory card was in fact a Bible, but in the end it didn’t matter as long as the people involved believed it was a Bible. And of course if we hadn’t found the Bible we could have proceeded with everyone affirming that they would tell the truth.  Kind of makes me wonder what the big deal is here.

 

Forecast Gloomy

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I was enjoying my cup of coffee this morning while catching up with email and favorite blog posts and my mood was positively sunny.  Then I came across this post on David Boyd’s blog and followed his instructions to view the Nuclear Jihad videos on the NY Times website.   Well, there went my good mood.  Here’s what David had to say about the videos:

The only thing more shocking than how extensive and user-friendly the
AQ Kahn network was, is how surprised our intelligence and government
officials were at how extensive and user-friendly the AQ Kahn network
was.

If we were this clueless about what was happening, even after our
senses were heightened following 9/11, then we’re just waiting. This
thing is Hurricane Katrina + 9/11 * 1000. We know it’s coming. We don’t
know where and when and what we’re going to do about it.

This economy and lifestyle we have in the US and the West in general is
a powerful thing. More people are living well in the West than have
lived well in the history of the world. This is the pinnacle of human
achievement and one wonders what can happen to derail it. This is it.
Once the bomb goes off, we’ll look back at this period of innocence and
naivete with longing. Enjoy it while it’s happening.

Remember when the 9/11 report came out and everyone was saying that our intelligence breakdown was in part a failure of imagination?  Well, how hard is it to imagine that at some point in the future we’ll be looking back at our current naivete with longing?  Think about how we look back at pre-9/11/01 now and then multiply by a factor of 10 and I think we have an idea about how right David probably is.

There went my good mood.

Stupid Lawyers. Oxymoron?

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I recently stumbled upon a cool new web service called Stumble Upon (hat tip to Sean Coon for pointing it out) which is a little browser tool you can download and use for free. Here’s how it’s described by BBCWorld:

"Stumbleupon is a brilliant downloadable toolbar that beds into your browser and
gives you the chance to surf through thousands of excellent pages that have been
stumbled upon by other web-users"

So I was using my little new procrastinating tool and I found this page of funny quotes from courtroom transcripts.  Here’s a small sample, but then you really should check out the whole thing:

Lawyer:  "How far apart were the vehicles at the time of the
collision?"

and,

Lawyer:  "Were you alone or by yourself?"

and,

Lawyer:  "I show you Exhibit 3 and ask you if you recognize
that picture."

Witness:  "That’s me."

Lawyer:  "Were you present when that picture was taken?"

and,

Lawyer:  "Doctor, did you say he was shot in the woods?"

Witness:  "No, I said he was shot in the lumbar region."

and,

Lawyer:  "Were you acquainted with the deceased?"

Witness:  "Yes sir."

Lawyer:  "Before or after he died?"

and,

 

Lawyer:  "What is your relationship with the plaintiff?"

Witness:  "She is my daughter."

Lawyer:  "Was she your daughter on February 13, 1979?"
   

 

and finally,

Lawyer:  "Now, doctor, isn’t it true that when a person
dies in his sleep, in most cases he just passes quietly away and
doesn’t know anything about it until the next morning?"

Are We Living in the New Appalachia?

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Dana Blankenhorn has written an interesting piece called "The New Appalachia" in which he argues that the abject poverty we used to associate with Appalachia has shifted to the areas between the mountains and the coast.  From his post:

Appalachia had resisted all attempts to bring it prosperity. Places
last western Virginia, West Virginia, eastern Tennessee and western
North Carolina were as poor as they had ever been. There seemed to be
no solution.

But there was a solution, right around the corner. These are now
"the mountains," that fabled far-away magical land where lowlanders
dream of retiring to. This is now the east’s vacationland, an
alternative to the beach, where rafting and hiking and mountain biking
rule the summers, and skiing the winters. The resort and retirement
economies have transformed these areas into, if not greater prosperity
spheres, at least something resembling the rest of America.

But a new Appalachia has developed in our time. It’s the river
bottoms, the swamplands, the vast middle between the mountains and the
seacoast. Millions of people live there, in grinding lives of poverty
or of faded wealth. And it’s getting worse.

The farm economy that once sustained these areas has collapsed. The
factories that once dotted the landscape have moved overseas. Much of
the land now consists of tree farms, and the people who are left are
steadily losing ground.

The biggest difference between today’s Appalachia and yesterday’s is
more stark, however. It’s the color of the victims. (That’s the point of the chart at left, from the Knight Foundation.)  Because in the
South, the new Appalachia is often the "black belt," land share-cropped
for some generations, then lost to the trees.

This hit home because Winston-Salem and the Piedmont Triad are situated to the east of the mountains and have been hit hard by the meltdown of the furniture and textile industries.  My first inclination was to disagree with Dana’s assertion that this is a disproportionately black phenomenon since at least in this area the hit has been taken be people of all colors, but if you think of it in comparison to Appalachia, which was predominately white, then I guess it makes sense.

The good news here is that the local leadership has been very proactive in trying to convert the local economy from a manufacturing base to a more "intellectual" base of biotechnology and design services.  The success has been mixed but it looks promising for the future.  To me the question that remains is "Will the jobs be filled by re-trained locals or by outsiders who follow the jobs here?".

And Dana’s bigger point about the lowlands is a good one.  While the Piedmont seems to be on the upswing all you have to do is drive to the beach through literally hundreds of dying or dead small towns to realize that your seeing an economic wasteland of immense proportions.

Finally, let’s not forget that the evolution of Appalachia to the "fabled far-away magical land" has not come without some negative effects within the mountain communities.  For instance in this article in the Raleigh News & Observer we see that while local leaders in the western North Carolina mountains welcome the influx of tax dollars and service jobs that come with the development of luxury second-home communities local residents worry about how their going to pay the taxes on their suddenly soaring property valuations.  And of course some people aren’t going to be happy with the influx of carpetbaggers no matter how many jobs it creates.

For the most part, though, I agree with Dana’s post.

Where I’d Like to Position the Missionaries

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Something I’ve mentioned on numerous occasions since moving to Winston-Salem is that when I was in the DC area most people would ask me "What do you do?" when they met me but here they ask "What’s your church?".  And it’s not confined to parties or other social situations.  It happens at the grocery store, the barber shop, and just about any other public forum.  It’s also interesting to me that people here will unabashedly share their religious views with total strangers and will invoke religion in discussions of things like schools.  Let’s just say that school prayer is still a hot issue here.

It has never really bothered me that people profess their religion so publicly and it also doesn’t bother me when they ask where I go to church and then invite me to attend theirs.  The public square is as much theirs as it is mine and I’ve always felt that if it made me uncomfortable I could just ignore the question or brush them off.  Although I’ve never done it I’ve had in the back of my head a plan to say "I’ll come if you let me sacrifice a chicken on the altar like I do in my basement".

What does bug me is when members of various churches knock on my door and try to sell me on their church.  This is my sanctuary after all and I don’t like it being invaded.  I understand that most Christians believe it is a necessity to recruit (I don’t know where it is but there’s apparently a passage in the New Testament that invokes people to play Coach K and recruit for Jesus’ team), and as I said before I don’t mind if they use the public square to do it, but when I’m at home I want to be left alone. 

Quick side note: Whenever I hear people talk about the part of the Bible where they’re instructed to go out and recruit I always wonder why they assume it means for their particular church?  I mean if I’m Christian then I’m Christian, so what does it matter where I go to church?  Two words: collection plate.

A notable exception is the Mormons.  Yes this is very inconsistent but there’s a personal reason.  When I was a kid my family was Mormon and at an early age I was being prepared for the day that I would go on my mission.  I started saving money at around 8 years old, but when my parents got divorced we left the church so I never got much past saving $20 for the bike I was going to ride for God.  To this day I’m still on the books with the Mormons and they periodically send the boys in white shirts to my house to say hi.  It’s easy for me to see myself in their shoes so I’m inclined to be sympathetic.  And because they’re so young it’s also easy for me to steer them away from selling to talking basketball over a glass of water that they’re always thankful for, which means it’s almost always a pleasant 15 minutes.

The other churches tend to send little blue haired ladies who are not easily swayed from their topic.  They’re also stubborn and doctrinaire and exactly the kind of people I don’t much want to hang with, but because they’re little blue haired ladies I’m incapable of brushing them off. It would be too much like brushing off my grandmother.  I think if they sent someone younger I’d be able to invoke my chicken sacrifice ploy, but I just can’t do it with the blue hairs.

So I’ve started to think about how I can cut them off at the pass, as it were.  Some ideas include:

  • Putting a Buddha on the front porch.
  • Keeping a turban by the front door that I can don before opening the door.  They wouldn’t know a Sikh from a Shitzu, but they’d know that whatever I was I wasn’t Christian.  It’d probably scare ’em to death and I’m willing to bet they’d set a record for the 100 yard dash in the 80+ division.
  • Put a statue of the Virgin Mary on the front porch and a sign on the front door that says "We’re Catholic and One of Us Used to be Mormon".  This has the advantage of being true and thoroughly confusing.  What could they possibly say?

For the record we’ve been attending the Moravian church down the road for the last several months.  They’re great people, they never once knocked on our door and they spend an inordinate amount of time eating chicken pie and drinking coffee.  Exactly the kind of people I want to hang with.

In anticipation of those of you who I’m sure I’ve offended let me say this: I’ve spent a lot of time in various churches including Mormon, Presbytarian for a couple of months, Unitarian for one service, Baptist with some of my cousins, Lutheran High School for three years, Lutheran College for one year, Catholic for much of my adulthood, Methodist for several services and now Moravian.  There is much more similarity than difference between them, and almost all of the difference is in what I’ll call ceremony.  From what I can tell the doctrinal differences are more important to the church leaders than their congregations so where I choose to spend my time is based more on the people of the church than the doctrine.  That probably best explains my peturbation at being evangelized (I feel like a Verizon customer being cold-called by Cingular) and my inclination to be attracted to the Moravians’ honey-pot practice of "Food and Fellowship."

Cool NC State Parks Site

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Of the "web 2.0" developments I think that the coolest is the explosion of "mashups" that resulted from companies like Google opening up their API (whatever that is) and letting any Joe Citizen develop a widget or service incorporating its service.  A great example is this mashup of data on North Carolina state parks and Google Maps.  If you click on any of the bubbles it will pop up a window with a weather forecast from Yahoo, a link to pictures tagged with the name of the park on Flickr , and a link to the park’s own website.  Simple, but effective.

Orni…,uh, Ornithol…, Aw Heck, Just Call it Birdshit

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One of my lasting memories of childhood is my mother freaking out around birds.  Any birds, big or small, caused her to melt into a stuttering, jittery mess if they got within arms length of her.  Her condition resulted from a childhood run-in she had with a rabid chicken on some family member’s farm (I think that’s the story) and she’d never been able stand them after that.

When I was in college I was living in an apartment with a couple of guys, including my longtime roommate Fig (cool story: Fig moved to Winston-Salem two years before I did and we now see him and his family more than we ever used to in DC).  He worked at a pet store and then at the Fairfax County Animal Shelter and would often bring home the animals that were considered hopelessly ill and try to nurse them back to health.  One of those animals was a large, white thing that I think was a cockatoo. Whatever it was it had a condition that caused it to lose its feathers over time, resulting in a constantly decaying state of plumage and an attitude more surly than a 13 year old girl deprived of a cell phone (I know where of I speak).  It lived on a pedestal placed on our only table which was located at the central most point in our apartment. That meant you couldn’t go anywhere in the apartment without the thing hissing or trying to fling poop at you.  Thankfully it couldn’t go anywhere due to its bald state and you were safe if you stayed about a foot outside the perimeter of the table.

Needless to say once the bird from hell moved in Mom stopped visiting, but not until she’d stopped by before I could warn her about our new roommate.  She walked in, was hissed at, let out a kind of cry/whelp, blanched whiter than our bald bird, turned around and didn’t come back until it moved out. Note: "moved out" is a euphemism for "croaked".

All this is a long preface to the true topic of this post which is the amazing change Mom made a couple of years ago when she met her leading man, the estimable Dr. Bert Dickas, retired professor of geology and avid bird watcher.  In the years since they met she’s joined him on numerous birding expeditions and can now tell a pigeon from an emu.  She’s gone so far as to fly to a Caribbean destination with the express purpose of tromping through the jungle looking for exotic birds rather than basking on a beach.  Even more impressive is that he’s talked her into driving to destinations not on either of the coasts, heretofore known as "the other America", to watch migrating birds.  Never underestimate the power of love.

I thought of this after reading about the website of Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology. I’m sure Bert will find it interesting and maybe Mom might even take a look at it.  Me?  I’m going to see if they have anything on surly, balding cockatoos.

How to Insure You Spend the New Year on Your Back

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Want to make sure you don’t overdo it during the holidays?  Here’s a step-by-step procedure that worked for me this year:

  1. A couple of days after Christmas do something that tweaks your lower back.
  2. Spend two days lying on the floor with a heating pad.
  3. Recover just in time to travel to visit family for the weekend.
  4. Make sure someone in the family is contagious with a stomach bug.
  5. Catch the bug.
  6. Return home.
  7. 24 hours after returning notice a strange rumbling in your belly.
  8. Spend 48 hours counting the stripes in the wallpaper in your bathroom since you pretty much live there full time.
  9. Lose 8 pounds!
  10. Have your back tighten up just as you’re feeling better from the stomach bug and spend another night on the floor.

Happy new year!

Kids, Don’t be “The Answer”

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I’ve lately been wondering why I’ve always loved sports, not just playing them but also watching them. I’m not terribly enamored of professional or college sports industries, but I truly love watching the action.  Still I wonder why I, as a grown man, continue to enjoy watching boys and girls, young men and young women, play a game.  I used to assume it was because sports were one of the few places in the world where the winner was always apparent (college football being the notable exception) and where the "better man" on any given day prevailed.  I thought it was the last place in our complicated society where the simplicity of winning, the triumph of hard work combined with amazing talent, was displayed.  How naive.

Now I’m coming to believe that sports are a never ending parable.  My favorite recurring theme is that of the promising young talent who never comes to realize his potential, and of course his polar opposite in the grinder who has a base level of talent but works his ass off to realize his full potential. In the NBA the former gets the shoe contract at 22 and is out of the league at 28, and the latter plays for 10 years, never gets the shoe contract and is beloved by his teammates.  But as with many parables this is an oversimplification.

Take the example of Allen "The Answer" Iverson.  He’s a remarkable talent, a scoring machine and a fearless competitor on the court.  He’s also a malcontent, an inefficient shooter and a ball hog.  I’d argue that the only reason he scores 30+ points a game is that he takes an unbelievable number of shots, and that if he truly wanted to reach his full potential he’d learn how to be a point guard who leads the league in assists while averaging 20 points a game.  He’s just too quick and too good a ball handler not to be a great point guard, but instead he puts on a one-on-one clinic every night, hoists 25 shots a game and leads the league in points scored and teammates-as-spectators.

Now Iverson is playing for the Denver Nuggets after wearing out his welcome in Philadelphia.  Denver already has a great scorer in Carmelo Anthony and the sports prognosticators are all wondering if the two of them can share the ball.  Hopefully they can, but the only way it will happen is if Iverson finally reaches his full potential as a basketball player.  He needs to transform himself into a true point guard.  He’s still one of the quickest guys in the league and if he decided to he could put an incredible amount of pressure on any team in the league by breaking down their defense with his dribble and then distributing the ball to his open teammates. 

Thinking about Iverson reminds me of conversations I used to have with my Mom when I was in high school.  School came pretty easily to me and I could bring home an A-B report card without breaking too much of a sweat.  I was a perennial "B Honor Roll" kid and what I got from Mom was, "Should have been an A Honor Roll, and it would have been if you’d studied harder."  That was usually followed by, "Being smart isn’t enough, you also have to work hard."  The rest of my life has been spent figuring out how right she was. You see I might have been considered pretty smart in high school, but in college I was average at best and my lack of a work ethic took its toll the first couple of years.  It was only when I learned to crack the books throughout the semester, not just before mid-terms and finals, that my GPA started going north of 3.0.

Now as a father I have the opportunity to see the "talent/work ethic" mix at play.  All three of my kids are very bright, all have an immense amount of talent, and all have a varying degree of work ethic.  One seems to have been born with a burning desire to achieve at the highest level and has the straight A report cards to prove it.  The other two seem to have been born with immense imaginations that have them living in an alternative universe about 50% of the time.  The only reason they don’t come home with straight C report cards (or worse) is a fear of the parental wrath that would ensue.  Our straight A kid has no more "natural talent" than our other two, unless you consider an innate work ethic as a talent (it might very well be), but because she works harder she accomplishes more than her siblings at this point.

Now some might argue that measuring my kids’ accomplishments by their grades isn’t fair.  After all there’s more to life than grades.  That’s true and again I think Iverson’s story provides a powerful lesson.  If school is the "game" and grades are a form of keeping score then they matter for that very reason.  But as is the case with Iverson,  how you play is as important as how much you score.

Iverson is famous for a press conference he had during a tiff he was having with his coach about practice.  He hated practicing and repeatedly pointed out that he couldn’t believe he was being held accountable for missing practice.  He figured that if he showed up with his "warrior" mentality for each and every game then practice was irrelevant.  This is a pretty common argument among the talented (I’m so good I don’t need to practice), but in basketball practice is the homework.  It’s where you hone and perfect your teamwork and it’s where you prepare for the big "test".  Talent can get you only so far, and without practice you’re going to encounter a situation for which you aren’t prepared and which no amount of talent will overcome.  His coach understood this and rightly insisted that Iverson practice with the rest of his team, and show up on time for that matter. Eventually Iverson’s intransigence became too much for the team and they put him on the shelf until they could find someone willing to take him.

For my kids the lesson here is that while good grades are important, it’s just as important how they go about getting them.  The reason that my daughter is realizing more of her potential than her brothers at this point is because she’s smart and she "practices".  When my sons "practice" they invariably succeed as well as their sister, but they have to be reminded to "practice" much more often than their sister.  If and when they learn that they need to "practice" without being hounded by their parents then they’ll be in great shape.  Until then I’ll ride them like a rented mule, or to keep on message I’ll be their version of Larry Brown.

Ho Frickin’ Ho

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Call me a Scrooge if you will but I’ve never been much of a "Yippee it’s Christmas!" guy.  Not sure why that is, but it has always been the case.  Luckily for the last 15 years I’ve been balanced out by my wife who usually gets into the spirit about 2-3 weeks before Christmas.  That means our tree is usually begrudgingly wrestled into place by yours truly 5-8 working days before Christmas.  If I’m feeling generous I’ll also do the lights and then the kids and Celeste will take care of decking it out as they listen to cheesy Christmas songs while I find something useful to do around the house, like watching a football game.

This year’s been different because Celeste hasn’t been infected with the spirit of the season either.  I’m not sure if it’s stress from work, the unseasonably warm weather, or the lack of peace on Earth but for whatever reason it’s been a very businesslike holiday season in our house, which means there hasn’t been a push to get the tree up this year.  Thankfully our kids are now old enough to take matters into their own hands and the result is that my oldest, Michael, wrestled the tree into place as I was working in my office last night.  By the time I wound things up at seven I came down the stairs to find the tree up and fully decorated.

Do I feel guilty?  Heck no! I’m elated that I didn’t have to do my normal back breaking, cursing routine as I tried for the 85th time to get the tree to stand up straight.  How festive is that anyway?  Now that I know that I’m not needed for the tree torture I think I might actually start looking forward to Christmas a little sooner.

Or not.  As Esbee pointed out people start getting surly around this time of year and I still have shopping to do.  Bah, humbug.