Prostitutes, governors, and baby animals

            Everything we do has an impact on future generations of baby humans and other animals. So it is with the resignation of New York Governor Spitzer over charges that he was a customer of a high dollar prostitution ring called the Emperor’s Club.

            That name suggests a problem to begin with. Global history tells us that emperors have a lousy record in leadership, and they don’t remain in power long. For a Christian, becoming an emperor doesn’t appear on any list of things for which we strive. Jesus made it clear that if any of us wants to be master, he must be a servant.

            So Spitzer may be guilty or innocent of a list of crimes of which he’s been accused. But either way, this is an environmental issue. You know why? Because we can’t care about recycling when we’re worrying about government criminals. And on a bigger scale, because nothing we do is isolated. Maybe you’re familiar with the idea that a butterfly can flap its wings in South America, and that sets in motion a chain of events that results in a Pacific typhoon. It’s like that.

            Just look at the impact this event has already had on America. It has consumed untold money, energy, spirit, and brainpower from Spitzer, his wife, their friends and family, police in at least two cities, the FBI, and the government of the state of New York. All those resources could have been put to work in positive ways to make life better for the people of New York, and for life on earth. New York tax payers should be furious that their money is spent to clean up this mess.

            It topped the news, and will continue to do so for days. In the media it will consume massive amounts of electrical energy, paper, ink, and fuel for travel. Radio and TV talk shows will gab about it as if our collective opinions would determine whether the governor did or didn’t do it.

            It focuses all of us on our failings as human beings, suggesting that we’re all in competition, and that even the best of us has to resort to illegal, sneaky, dirty little secrets. Further, it reminds us of other government scandals and suggests that all those things are part of leadership in America. When we enter government, we get big cars, big houses, luxurious living, bribes, insider dealing, and a healthy dose of sex outside of marriage, possibly with a price tag on it. It tells us that getting to the top and being self-centered just naturally go together.

            That’s the thing. Jesus tells us we’re to be others-centered, and never self-centered. What might his advice to Spitzer or any other governor be? Consider the lilies. Lean on me. Love God, other people, and yourself.

            And you see, that advice doesn’t depend on Spitzer or any other governor being a follower of Jesus. It’s simply good advice for living. Jesus spoke directly about political life in his era, and told stories about greed and lust for power. He made it clear that true leadership is about a sense of community. We all prosper and suffer together.

            How can a leader spend a single moment cooking up a scheme to hire a prostitute in a distant city, when he has sworn to help the people, and the people are in such need? People are starving. Prisons are horribly overcrowded. Rivers are polluted and coal-fired electric plants are generating acid rain that poisons our fish. All these are as true throughout the world as they are in New York.

            Every event like this makes us feel more isolated and desperate. It destroys our trust. It disheartens us, making us feel that our leaders are immoral, and that our own high morals are pointless. It can make us think, “If he got to be governor acting like that, why am I trying to walk the straight and narrow?”

            It suggests that sex is a marketable commodity, not sacred. If that’s not sacred, then other parts of the natural world aren’t sacred. It suggests that women aren’t to be respected. And if we don’t respect women in our own culture, we won’t respect other people in other cultures. If we don’t respect people, we certainly won’t respect drowning polar bears, poisoned salmon, and our children’s unborn children.

            Maybe the biggest issue here is the suggestion that government doesn’t care about the community, and therefore, we’re not expected to care about the community.

            Jesus calls us to live life, see life, embrace and sustain life. And regardless of our leaders’ religious affiliations, they are responsible to those same things. We’ve called them to care for us and help us care for each other. Everything they do tilts the scale toward life, or away from it.

The Funny Thing About Environmental Collapse

            These environmental collapses don’t come along very often. In fact, this one we’re living in is the first one. Come to think of it, it may also be the last one.

            Oh, sure, the earth has been through a couple of ice ages, but those weren’t caused by people. During the first ice age there were no people. And that’s why we don’t see any books in the used book stores titled, “I Survived The First Ice Age.”

Then in the last ice age, there were people, but no electricity, so nobody had to give up the central heating in their cave. They just threw another bear skin on the bed and made the best of it.

            This time, we may lose our central heat, and I don’t know about you, but I’m having trouble finding a bear to skin. On the other hand, we may not be headed for an ice age. Instead, it might get so hot we’ll all be running around in our underwear, which could be good or bad news, depending on who’s standing in line beside you at the movie theatre. But hot or cold, this environmental collapse is being caused by people.

            Right now you’re probably thinking, “Joe, what on earth are you talking about?” That’s a question I often hear and often can’t answer. But this time I can. I’m talking about the fact that our planet is rapidly becoming an unfit place to live. So when I say it’s “funny,” I mean “odd,” like fat people driving little bitty cars is funny. But I also mean it’s funny, as in “haha,” like when we walk out of the steakhouse and say, “Man, that was good. Wonder what the poor folks had to eat tonight. Haha” Then everybody laughs. Then of course everybody gets real quiet because they remember they’re supposed to care about poor people, not laugh at them.

            I’ll tell you something funny. Churches, which should be the frontline guardians of our environment, serving coffee in Styrofoam cups. Now, fifty years ago churches were serving coffee in paper cups, and it was hot and tasty. Isn’t it funny that they all switched to Styrofoam cups? The Styrofoam salesman must have retired very young and moved to Tahiti, where he drinks his coffee from a coconut.

            I’ll tell you something else funny. We had a big charity horse race in our city recently. It was an expensive, resources-consuming, and earth-polluting event to raise money for a children’s hospital. I imagine the earth thinks it’s funny that we don’t all just chip in for the hospital and skip the pollution. 

            So what else? Oh, we have a war. It’s just like the last war, except it’s been going on longer. In fact, longer than World War Two. And we still don’t know what it takes to win. It’s like a basketball game with nobody keeping score, except in this basketball game the players get their legs blown off. To end World War Two, some bad guys signed on the dotted line and it was over. In this one, we don’t even know who’s supposed to sign the surrender papers. It’s funny that some folks in our government say adamantly that we’re there to liberate Iraq, not to occupy it, and yet they say we’ll have forces there for decades. Haha.

            Did we get off the subject? Does the war have something funny to do with environmental collapse? Well, sure. We’re spending millions of dollars a day on the war, and only a tiny fraction of that on researching alternative energy sources. But you see, if we had low-cost, low-impact energy, life would be better for people, as well as for the planet, and we wouldn’t need the war. Imagine the last soldier walking across the border leaving Iraq and saying, “See ya, Ishtar. Keep your oil. Here’s a nice electricity-generating wind turbine to remember me by.” Ishtar goes home, hooks up his TV to the turbine, watches some “I Love Lucy” reruns, and everybody’s happy. Haha.

            Which reminds me of starving babies. Okay, that’s not funny haha. But it is definitely funny odd. Lots of those starving babies are in countries that are already environmentally collapsed. Poof. That’s it. No more. Take Haiti. Please. Folks there have developed a recipe for dirt cookies. It’s like when we were kids and made mud pies, only in Haiti they really eat them. The soil and water are so depleted, they can’t even feed a small fraction of the people who live there. It’s a nation that lives on imported food. The only hope might be to move everybody out and begin a nationwide environmental restoration, beginning with planting grass, and lasting hundreds of years.

In Africa we see odd wars and odd political struggles over natural resources. Millions of people are sitting in the sand shooing flies, while armies, general, and rulers, which are sometimes the same person, bicker over the oil, gold, diamonds, water, and gorilla body parts.

            So now back to fat people in little cars. Are you offended that I think that’s funny? Okay, I think it’s funny when tiny little housewives drive huge SUV’s too. That make you feel better?

            But the thing about fat people is that we all pay the cost of obesity. We also pay for cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, AIDs, and asthma. See, we’ve all helped put together this competitive, fast-paced, complex culture. And part of the culture is that we eat fast food, processed food, chemical-laced food, and food that comes from thousands of miles away. Isn’t that funny? People in Chicago eating lettuce from California? People in Texas eating Australian apples? Haha.

            So people are stressed and overweight and they don’t exercise. We all pay for health research, health insurance, and public health care. We all pay for our fellow employees who are out of work sick. We all pay for our own family members who are sick.

            Isn’t it funny that we can’t all stop this insanity and eat what’s growing locally? Eat healthy stuff? Eat more pure food and less chemicals?

            So now you’re saying, “How did AIDs and asthma get in that list of food-related diseases?” You’re right, they don’t have much to do with food. But they’re real good examples of two things. First, diseases now spread quickly and internationally. AIDs probably came to America from Africa. And now bird flu is waiting in the wings. Haha! Get it? Bird flu’s waiting in the wings. Now that’s funny.

And asthma is the mystery disease that we know is aggravated by air pollution, especially car exhaust, and by being closed up in houses with all kinds of chemical gases. We see children’s lives threatened by asthma, and still, we keep living the same way. That’s not haha, but it’s definitely odd.

And this culture we have in America is what the world wants. So what would happen if everybody in America started living a simple, clean, low-impact life? There are still roughly four times as many people around the world who will want everything we left behind. They want to know what it’s like to get fat, drive gas-guzzling cars, compete at breakneck speed, waste food, and dump benzene in the creeks that supply their drinking water. Isn’t that funny?

Somewhere there’s a wolf being chased by a hunter in a helicopter. There’s a drowning polar bear clinging to a melting chunk of ice. There are tadpoles suffocating because the water temperature is rising. There’s a baby eating a dirt cookie. There’s a young businessman having a heart attack. There’s a father selling meth so he can feed his children.

Oh, and here’s a funny angle on the insane cost of gasoline: investors are trading in oil futures. In other words, they’re betting that the price of oil will keep going up. And the American president, when asked in a radio interview in February, 2008, didn’t know the cost of gasoline was forecast to climb to four dollars a gallon. Haha.

The Nature of Evil

            Thinking back to the gasoline crisis of September ’08, prices were hovering around $4 a gallon, and for several days 80% of the stations in our city had no gas. Those that did have gas were jammed with cars coming and going from all directions. Screaming matches and fights broke out as flustered, hot, tired motorists tried to wiggle their way up to the pump. There we were, a city in a pickle, everyone needing the same kind of help, and rather than cooperating, some competed, snarled, and turned violent. It was evil.

            There’s a sprawling collection of cigarette butts on the roadside at the stoplight. There’s a city worker spraying lethal herbicides along the road. There’s a family throwing away leftovers, while a family just across town goes to bed hungry. Are those things evil?

People marvel, talk, and wonder about evil. What’s evil and what is not? Did God create it? Why does God allow it? With all the Bible’s promises, will we ever see “a new heaven and a new earth?”

Those questions, and especially the last one, are big and troubling. After all, just consider all the generations of our ancestors who’ve repeated the promises that life is going to get better, God will prevail, and our enemies will be defeated. Tell that to my friend Pat who died of cancer last year. Tell that to Greg, whose brain was scrambled in a car wreck with a drunk driver. Tell that to the orphanage nurse who cares for a fetal alcohol syndrome baby. Then there are the wars. Corporate greed. Hard-working families huddling under torn blankets to keep warm because they can’t pay their electric bill.

Well, let’s think about God’s role in that. To say, ”Why does God allow evil,” would mean why does God allow the existence of cancer that took Pat’s life. Really, it was Pat’s cigarettes that brought on the cancer. So the question becomes, “If we smoke cigarettes and get cancer, why doesn’t God ride in on a white horse and cure it?” That’s really what most of our questioning comes down to: why doesn’t God rescue us from the evil that people create. Or maybe: why didn’t God create us in such a way that we can smoke and not get cancer? Then we start to realize that there’s the evil of smoking cigarettes, which is far different from the evil of, let’s say, Hitler.

Evil, however you want to define it, and on whatever scale, has always been part of the human story. And if we want to have a little more understanding of it, it’s important to see the human role in perpetuating evil. In this tiny article we’re not going to try to explain the mass murderers, and heartless villains. But we can see more clearly the threats to peace, health, and joy in our own homes.

We don’t know a lot about what causes cancer, but we might guess nobody had it in the Garden of Eden. And it’s certainly not brought on by healthy living, with clean air and water, pesticide-free food, daily exercise, and stress-free, satisfying work. So when one of us shows up with cancer, we may not see the cause clearly, like the link between Pat’s illness and Pat’s smokes. But we can usually see that the human body wasn’t designed for the way it’s been living. Car wrecks? God didn’t create cars, drunk driving, crowded highways, and distractions like cell phones. And God certainly doesn’t whisper in our ear, “Please drive late into the night until you fall asleep and hurl your vehicle off the road.” Clearly, God doesn’t foster evil in our world.

There’s a premature, poorly-formed baby dying. Why does God allow that kind of evil? Because the mother’s body and emotions are such a mess that she can’t carry a baby full term. There’s a fender-bender down at the corner, and rather than the drivers helping each other sort it out, one gets out screaming and blaming, lawyers become involved, and it costs both drivers a lot of time, money, and stress. Why does God allow that kind of evil? Because the screaming driver was already a loaded cannon, so troubled that she was afraid of what her life would bring every day, and ready to blame everyone else.

We’re co-creators with God. We have freedom to breathe the air in the remote Rocky Mountains or the air in downtown Denver. We can grow our own vegetables and bring them fresh to the table, or buy the ones that are laced with chemicals and have lost their nutrients because they were picked weeks ago. We can spend our days hunting, fishing, and gardening, or spend our days drinking soft drinks while sitting at a computer.

Okay, so our choices aren’t that clear-cut, and they can be very difficult. We know that every cup of coffee we drinks helps keep a farm worker toiling for slave wages in Central America. Still, it’s hard to justify spending the extra money to buy fair trade coffee, which frees those workers and their families to live a decent life.

You might be thinking about joining the group of volunteers who’ll be cleaning up the local lakeshore next Saturday. That choice would be a lot easier if everyone else in town did the same. But they don’t do the same. In fact, many of them are out in their boats, tossing soft drink cans overboard, where they float over to the shore for us to clean up. Isn’t that a microcosm of the way the world works? So the point is, the human race creates a lot of its own evil. Or to put that another way, the Eden that God designed is long ago and far away.

Can we get back? Well, the real question is whether we want to get back. And the answer is that most of us don’t. Most of us want more money, stuff, and business success, and we want it in the next day, or the next thirty days, or the next year. Another way to look at that would be envision a return to Eden by our children or their children. We can look toward what we can do to reduce the evil in their world. But you see, that’s not what our society values. That’s not what the world values. It’s our values that allow, perpetuate, and nurture evil in the world. The evil of lust, greed, gluttony, and the other deadly sins.

When we look around at the suffering in the world, it’s easy to become disheartened. People are having a tough time everywhere we look, in America and around the world. But there’s hope. And it begins with seeing how we create our own suffering, then eliminating that. Cleaning up our world, our diet, and the way we live, will go a long way to eliminating the evil in our own lives, and the lives of other people. Then by conversation, example, and social action, like cleaning up the lakeshore, maybe we influence somebody else to clean up their world. And that’s how things get better, one life at a time. One day at a time. One prayer at a time.

To da dump, to da dump, to da dump, dump, dump

            It was Saturday, spring cleaning, and I had a trailer load of junk that needed to go to the dump. My son had a friend over to play, and part of the day’s plan was for the boys to go to the dump with me. It was their first time, and I was excited for them. The dump is always cool, but especially if you’ve never been.

            Now, the buddy who was coming over has parents who don’t see the dump the same way I do. In fact, I’m sure they’ve never seen a dump at all. Before they brought the kid over to the house, they told him not to touch anything at the dump.

            I had to laugh. Did they think I was going to send him out to play in medical waste and to sample moldy packages of rancid baloney?

            The place we went is one of two locations that receive the trash for our rural county. To some people, that might suggest we were going to bounce over rutted, rarely-traveled roads, pull over when we saw a good place, and toss our stuff into some remote ravine. Instead, our dump is a model for the world. It’s a whirlwind of recycling, separating, collecting, storing, and disposing.

            When you drive in, there’s a cheery old guy in a booth, smoking his pipe and saying, “Howdy.” His name is Bill. As you stop at Bill’s window, your car is being weighed. It only takes a second, but you can stay and visit as long as you want if there’s not another car behind you.

            The air is clear, and birds flit and sing in the surrounding oaks and poplars. You’re on a bare hillside with some paved areas, overlooking a little valley crossed by a couple of access roads, and surrounded by wooded hills. The place is buzzing with activity.

            I know there are tons of kitchen garbage and other wet stuff at the dump. But we can’t see it or smell it. That’s all in the landfill on the other side of a hill, where the garbage trucks go when they leave our neighborhoods. But at this place, there are only a couple of dumpsters for the few people who brought garbage, and at the end of the day those will be dumped into a truck, and taken around the hill.

            So we back our trailer to the end of a driveway and toss the junk over the edge. What a blast watching our old TV tumble and smash into a bin at the bottom. Oh, but before we toss it over, Gene, the nice young man helping us, snips the cord off and tosses it into a pile with a million others. Those wires will be recycled.

            That dead computer? Recycled, to keep its heavy metals out of the landfill. And that roll of carpet goes in the carpet pile. There’s a guy who opened a carpet recycling facility in our city a couple of years ago, and his business grows every day. Virtually all carpet can be recycled. Even recycled carpet can be recycled.

            Gene helps us get the mattress on top of a pile of mattresses. There’s a lot of good metal in those springs. And the rusty barbecue grill goes in a pile of steel. There’s a bin for empty paint cans. Next to that is a shelf for good cans of paint. Anybody who’s not too choosy about color can pick those up. Next to that is a shelf for bug spray, weed killers, and other assorted chemicals. And there’s a pile of tires. Specialized recyclers will come pick all that up.

            Over behind Bill’s booth there’s a fiberglass boat and a half dozen bicycles in need of various repairs. Maybe somebody will come along, take those home, and fix them one of these days.

            As we drive out, we pass the oil recycling tank, which hosts a steady stream of folks. It’s beautiful, in its own nasty way. All that oil will be reclaimed and used again.

We stop at Bill’s booth and say, “We’re all done,” and our car is weighed again. That’s how Bill knows the weight of the trash we brought, and that’s how he figures how much we owe. We pay Bill $7 for that heaping trailer load, he gives the kids a piece of candy, and we all say, “So long.”

            Leaving, I was struck by a sense of community. Everyone there was living and consuming. Buying things we needed and things we didn’t need, and as those things reached the limits of their usefulness, we all had to do something with them. Everybody deals with that. Our parents did, but our ancestors didn’t; they had so little, there was little to dispose of.

I’d say most of the people at the dump knew they could toss their junk out along the road at midnight. But there are laws about that, for good reason, and there are better, healthier ways to deal with all that. So we gathered at the dump.

            There were all kinds of cars, all kinds of people. Rich and poor, highly educated and not, office workers and laborers. The place wasn’t gross or smelly or dirty. It was organized, thoughtful, and purposeful. It was a learning experience, because we saw how recycling works on a county-wide scale. It was a community experience, because we were all connected in our consumption and need to dispose of the products of our consumption. It was a humbling experience, because we came face to face with ourselves, tossing pieces of our lives over the edge.

In the end, going to the dump is a holy experience, out on that hillside, doing the best we can to take care of what God has given us, seeing bits of creation move through our hands. There we are, working to save everything that can be saved.

And as for my son’s friend, I wish his parents could have been there. Maybe instead of, “Don’t touch anything,” they’d have told him, “Go on, dig in, help out. Touch life.” I hope some day they go to a dump. I hope they see what we saw. I hope they learn the things we learned that day, just going to da dump.

What’s Wrong With McDonald’s?

            What’s so wrong about McD’s? There are so many things. But I’ll have to say, there are some good, attractive things about McDs. It’s so fast. And it’s everywhere. You can almost always find one when you need one. And it’s so cheap. You can get a couple of cheeseburgers for two bucks.

But there’s a formula in life. Everything has a price. So when we look at McDs, we have to ask ourselves, what does it cost. What do we pay for food that’s fast, everywhere, and cheap? We pay dearly.

Let’s just look at the  food. Everything on the menu, including the salad dressings, contains high fructose corn syrup. McD, and lots of other food marketers, have taught us to love sugar in our food. Granted, corn syrup is an easily-digested form of sugar, but we sure eat too much of it. Also, McD’s menu is high in fat, low in…well everything we need.

            But that’s not the real issue for us here today. More to the point is that every McD looks the same. They’re in the prime places, the most expensive, highest-traveled intersections. And the other fast food joints are at the same corners, or just down the block, so that every major corner in America looks the same. What’s so bad about that? It’s what we’ve lost. The mom and pop businesses. The local connection, hi, neighbor, and how’s your mom and them? We’ve lost that rich tapestery that once was main street USA.

            The McD on your corner is probably one of a group that’s owned by a franchisee. He may or may not be involved in the community. But the point is that the ownership is centralized, not local. The money flows out of the community. So instead of mom and pop’s burger joint, where mom and pop make money and spend it at the corner grocery store, buy clothes at the store down the street, subscribe to the hometown newspaper, and get Popsicles from the ice cream wagon for their kids, the money goes to the franchisee, who lives fifty or a hundred or two hundred miles away. He spends the money there.

            What’s more, the food comes from outside the community. Rather than supporting any kind of local agriculture or baking, McD buys everything in enormous quantities, at ridiculously low prices, transporting things over great distances, and most of the food is frozen. Getting the food to us uses enormous amounts of gasoline. Some of it comes from other countries, so it uses diesel fuel and shipping facilities. All this means the food places demands on trucks, roads, and fuel. All this means we create pollution to get food to us. In short, the food has no soul. It this is food that doesn’t care about us.

            Then there’s the fun aspect. McD has taught us to play with out food. It has fun names, it comes in fun containers, it’s endorsed by cartoon characters, and it comes with free toys. And they’ve created a tenuous bond with every major motion picture that comes out. What’s the connection between a McD soft drink and Jurassic Park? None. But putting a picture of a dinosaur on the cup sure made a lot of people buy it. So they’ve taught us to care about marketing, instead of nourishment. We’ve becoming willing pawns. Whatever they say is important, is important.

            Now, of course, I’m not just talking about McD. The same characteristics are true of every fast food marketer, and all kinds of other stores. And now I’m going to make a big jump here and tell you what this has to do with world peace in the long run. You know, things are getting so bad here in America that many of us are beginning to see the light. We may be ready for the dawn of a new era in which we turn away from McD, or McD may change. Whatever happens, we may be ready for a change for the better. But all over the world there are countries and peoples who are just now ready for McD. They want their share of the American dream, or whatever this is that we’re living. They want cheap hamburgers and plenty of high fructose corn syrup.

            They’re ready to work longer hours, drive bigger cars, spend less time at home with their children, drink more alcohol in various blends and flavors, travel for exotic vacations, consume more of the earth’s resources, and compete. Do you realize the world is full of people who’ve never really competed? Don’t worry, McD can teach them how to compete. After all, McD is all about competition. It’s not what we need to eat. It’s about how many McD’s in which locations will yield the greatest profit. It’s about  bigger signs. Taller signs.  It’s about getting the best locations, and beating Burger King. It’s about filling your belly faster and cheaper so you can get back to work and compete.

            One of the best examples I can give you of the destructive power of McD is that recently the toy in their Happy Meal was a Humvee. That’s right, one of the great symbols of American overconsumption, competition, and belligerence. The Hummer, which is the biggest, bulkiest, hardest to drive, most gas-hungry of the SUV’s, doesn’t even have the most cargo space. It’s just big. So McD is helping train our kids up as the next generation of fossil fuel burning competitors.

            Friends, they have so much influence. They’re everywhere. They’re powerful. They’re rich. Just imagine if they would turn all that to the good of humanity. Another McD in London? Will that help? The first McD in Uganda? Will that help? No, we need brotherhood and sisterhood. Humanity. Compassion. Now, if someone from McD were here right now, they might say, “We’re in the business of selling burgers, not saving humanity.” But that’s not true. They’re in the business of selling a culture of consumption. They teach us every day with their products, their ads, and the pervasiveness of their presence. If McD, and all the other corporations like it, can teach competition and consumption, while selling burgers, then they could certainly teach compassion and caring, while selling burgers.

            I confess, I love football. Intellectually, I can tell you all the reasons it’s bad. But I still love it. I played. Both my sons play. I never missed one of their games, and I missed very few of their practices. I watch football on tv. I just love it. Fortunately, I love lots of things, and I can see beyond football. In fact, I can watch a game Sunday night, and Monday morning I probably won’t be able to tell you who won. Besides, I can justify sports, on the basis that they are an arena, the intense rivalry and competition exist in that little sandbox, according to those rules, then it’s over. In fact, there may some great good in the example they lift up to us. Sports say to us, this is sports. This isn’t life.

            No, the problem with sports today is what has become of sports at the hands of the media. Handsome quarterback number one has a hangnail, and every commentator in the country has to comment on it. Mr. Linebacker Extraordinairre get arrested for drunk driving, and the airwaves are filled with predictions about whether he’ll go to jail. We’ve forgotten the number one lesson of sports, this isn’t life.

            The same is true of all sorts of things. Our extreme news covereage lifts up story after story that bears little relation to us, and convinces us that it matters, our opinions matter, and what we have to say about it matters. Friends, it doesn’t matter.