Religion

Across the Great Divide

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Peter Watson, The Great Divide: Nature and Human Nature in the Old World and the New (New York: Harper Perennial, 2013)

As my reviews tend to do, this one will highlight some negatives, but which I will get out of the way early on. Peter Watson is a highly successful author and journalist who has rather more than dabbled in archaeology along the way. I am … somewhat less of an authority. Nonetheless, The Great Divide is kind of a mess, but one that ends up being sufficiently thought-provoking to be worth the effort.

Fun stuff first—shout-out to Jim Bennett for recommending the book; and here are my ideas for relevant musical interludes while reading the following:

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Smashing the State

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There won’t be any surprises in this one for anyone who knows me at all well, but I’ll try to at least make it entertaining.

My very first lasting memory of a news event with political content took place on the afternoon of Sunday 21 January 1968. A B-52 with four hydrogen bombs aboard took off from Thule AFB and crashed somewhere in the Arctic, location unknown.
Ten days later, the Tet Offensive began.
Nine weeks and one day after that, Dr King was assassinated.
Nine weeks less one day after that, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated.
Twelve weeks to the day after that, I first saw real human blood shed live on television via cameras above the intersection of Michigan and Balbo as the Chicago police attacked demonstrators during the Democratic National Convention.

I was eight years old.

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“THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IS A STORY OF LOVE VS. HATE”

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There is a lot of truth in this column:

President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joseph Biden are not the stars or antagonists in this tale. Their supporters are.
 
A blind unconditional love of their leader fuels the energy and action of Trump supporters. They risk their health (maskless rallies), reputation (accusations of racism and sexism) and safety (social media and Antifa harassment) to stand with their hero.
 
A blind unconditional hatred of President Trump fuels the energy and action of Biden supporters. Their leader’s ideas, policies and resume are irrelevant. Biden is a tool to kill the Trump presidency. Nothing more.
 
[. . .]
 
A reliance on hate and an absence of love inevitably spark widespread corruption.
 
This is my problem with The Resistance, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, the far Left and their pervasive anti-American sentiment. There’s no love. It’s all hate.
 
Hate cannot sustain life, liberty, freedom and a pursuit of happiness.
 
As much as President Trump’s public behavior and narcissism annoy me, I’ve never questioned his love of America.

Worth reading in full.

Reopening — I (Practice)

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For most Americans, the great day of realization of the seriousness of the COVID-19 threat—or more precisely, the seriousness of the official reaction to it—was Thursday, March 12th, when they woke to the news that the previous evening, the National Basketball Association had postponed an OKC Thunder-Utah Jazz game after a player’s test result came back positive, and then quickly canceled the remainder of the season. I was less concerned with the NBA, but coincidentally, also on Thursday the 12th, was informed that a certain institution of higher education that we all know and love was moving to remote learning for undergraduate and graduate classes for its entire Spring Quarter of 2020. Simultaneously, nearly all students were ordered to plan to vacate their on-campus housing by 5 PM CDT on Sunday, March 22nd.

I had also just returned home from a severely truncated trip to Italy which had gotten no farther than New York City. Had the Italy leg been undertaken, I would have been on one of the last flights out of that country before it was locked down entirely, and would have been a strong candidate for two weeks of quarantine upon arrival in the US. I was therefore necessarily concerned with pandemic response, and on the day after my return home, sent an e-mail to several leaders and volunteers in my church with a general offer of expertise and recommendations to pursue several of the items discussed below, especially a communications plan.

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Risk Register

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There are, of course, many items that could be placed in a risk register for our ongoing management of COVID-19. I find myself drawn to those categorizable as, or perhaps triggered by, human perception and behavior. By way of limiting the scope of this post to reasonable attention spans, here are my current top 3:

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