On Being in a Hurricane

Common foes create camaraderie. Be they cold-blooded Nazis, malevolent Martians, microbic plagues, or as we are confronted in Florida, a horrific “act of God” hurricane, the victory is to be found in teamwork: sharing, caring and co-operative effort.

True, there was word of heated confrontations at the gas pump, understandable with MILES long lines to the few stations open, but these are few and way overblown. Anybody who has been through turmoil learns pretty quickly that the best way to insure everybody’s highest welfare is to cooperate and help one another, “share one another’s burdens” as the biblical phrase goes.

Last Monday at noon, just after the worst of the hurricane, I admit to a teensy crack in my faith. Like everybody else, I had little water, no power, but with an added dimension of having a brother in the hospital. Luckily I trusted instincts and had gone to Publix* on Sunday, anticipating a mild Cat 1 cane, truly not expecting to need the few provisions I did buy: some water, some fruit, some canned soup, crackers, etc., all to my exacting health standards (no hydrogenated or canola oils, no artificial anything, low sodium, no meat).

Yet the Cat 3 that materialized was far worse than anyone expected. Please don’t be fooled, it wasn’t nearly as bad as Katrina in New Orleans. Floridians still had their homes well intact, there was no flooding and the infrastructure is sound, albeit in need of widespread repairs. But when total power restoration is a month out, potable water is similarly non-existent, and property damage is unprecedented it’s pretty darn bad. The worst in 50 years they say.

THE HURRICANE

Here is what a Cat 3 hurricane sounds like from within a standard Fairfield Inn* outside entrance room. Around 10 pm (8 hours before the cane actually hits) the winds start howling, just like the worst windstorm you have ever heard; you know, when the wind blows long and strong and pulls at the door and sucks the air out of the room leaving you with a little heart palpitation and heightening your nerves only you know it’s just a rare strong wind that will soon subside.

But these winds only get louder and stronger and more consistent so that there is NO BREAK, none.

Every channel was tracking Wilma’s path from the Keys across the state and warned “Do NOT expect Wilma to weaken, it is moving too fast and will be just as strong as when it hit the gulf coast.” Thus, we have the extraordinary phenomena of a hurricane’s devastation as it was leaving the coast.

The power goes out around 2:00 am as the winds kept getting incredibly, impossibly, louder and stronger! They keep escalating in sound to a tone that keeps getting louder and louder, like an operatic diva on steroids.

Wilma hits full force around 6 am. It was as if a jet engine was right outside my door…but louder. With my mind still full of the record devastation of the last year’s many hurricanes I admit to being more than a little scared at first, but after a while I just had to open my door a few times to see this dude. I’d brace myself and crack the door every so often.

Unreal! Stiff, huge, thick palms bending, all kinds of stuff blowing completely horizontally for hours! Then the eye passed and the back end of the cane blows just as fiercely in the opposite direction.

By noon the worst had passed and it was time to venture out. I felt a little like Tom Cruise emerging from his basement after the alien invasion in War of the Worlds. Good lord, the stuff—all kinds of it—EVERYWHERE. Huge, hundred year old trees uprooted. Big utility poles, traffic lights, signs, roof remnants, signs covered the town. US 1 was barely passable, but I made it, every so slowly to the hospital, which was on generator power for the whole week.

THE AFTERMATH

Not knowing if or where you might get food, water or power is discomforting. For a self-professed believer in God who is called to FAITH regardless of circumstances it is a realization that I have a long way to go. Yet it was a major blessing that Publix* (also on generator power) opened on Tuesday.

Each day I’d leave the hospital and it was totally dark, not a light anywhere in the moonless night. It is amazing how importantly street lights are, one of the thousand things I took for granted before I temporarily lost them.

Then, Thursday night the power is back on in the motel (it is on the same power grid as the hospital)! Everybody was giddy with joy.

SILVER LININGS

1) As I mentioned earlier, turmoil can bring people together. In this case, you saw people totally in tune with helping one another. Forgotten were political, ideological, and philosophical differences that truly are petty matters in the larger scheme. The focus on our higher nature brings out the best in us all and makes us grateful for what we have, even though it is far less that what we had.

2) “Less Is More.” In the room, total blackness save the light from my fantastic $35 lithium-powered flashlight and the little light on the new Grundig emergency crank-powered radio from Radio Shack. Nothing to do, it was literally lights out by 9:00, the first time since 4th grade. No mind-cluttering TV, I caught up on much-needed sleep and felt terrific each morning.

*PUBLIX and The FAIRFIELD INN. They both deserve my sincere praise and admiration for serving the public so incredibly well. They were literally lifesavers for many of us. Both company’s people were just super, and despite having to weather their own difficulties, were focused on serving others. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

*And to the Holy Cross Hospital folks, from Gerald in security to Dorette on the nursing floor and everybody else as well…THANK YOU!

Rfd 10/30/05

Eyeing a Hurricane, Closely

24/7 hurricane coverage when safely ensconced the country’s midsection, thousands of miles from Florida is just more news sensationalism, but here in a Ft. Lauderdale hotel room with the pre-winds howling Wilma’s still-hours away arrival, the news has an urgent relevance.

A hospitalized brother flew me dead in the path of Wilma’s gaping jaw. Luckily, it looks as if this won’t be near the disaster of Katrina-Rita, yet the warnings have been non-stop, the lines in the stores long, as I joined the natives in queuing up for radios, flashlights, batteries, water and food.

“Dang, I shoulda took the collision insurance on my rental” I start thinking as the wind now grows louder with each commercial break. The Fairfield Inn has aluminum-shuttered all the windows, bringing it home that, yeah, we’re going to have 100+ mph winds. My brother is probably in the safest place he could be, Holy Cross hospital.

They say most folks stayed home at Key West, and that most in the Broward-Dade area are kind of living in denial. I hope we’re just living period tomorrow night!

Rfd 10/24/05 midnight

Rod Stewart IS Fall

Rod Stewart is fall. From Maggie May, the song of my football glory years ridin’ the pine at good ol’ Lafayette High, to the randomly played I-pod song during this almost-brisk* morning run, Every Picture Tells a Story.

*It was 58, not warm like it has been, but still not breath mist cold like late October mornings should be. I love cool, even cold, weather so unseasonably warm weather is uncomfortable. But with no hurricanes or tsunamis we have absolutely NOTHING to complain about. In any case there are MANY people who love the warm weather, and remembering that the best philosophy is to want (have love) for others as we want (have love) ourselves serves to “cool” me down.

[QUERY: Does love=want? This seems inconsistent, as “want” indicates a lacking, a pain. Of course “want” as used in the manner of wishing good is different, isn’t it? Well, no, not really because it still indicates that all is currently not fine, there is still something more needed to be “happy.” In fact for many of us LESS is MORE. Without realizing it our “wants” when fulfilled leads only to more unhappiness, which certainly is not love. Anyway, since warm weather makes others happy, there is solace for me. Whew! Sorry.]

So the sun was just rising on this gray morn, the mellow street lamps alit between trees now colored with those fabulous autumnal tones. Last night’s rain brings out such richness in the rusts, wines and golds of leaves now drained of August’s chlorophyll.

My feet slap fallen leaves, in death more beautiful than ever. Hum, the green leaf of summer stores fuel for its mother tree in summer, then in sacrificing that cholorphyillic feast serves humanity with its clarion call of color, the bellwether sign that Thanksgiving and Christmas are just around the corner.

A call that will hopefully again remind us of our better nature, our higher selves.

May we all be like the storybook leaves of fall.

Science vs Intelligent Design Explained

I feel my earlier piece on “Intelligent Design” needs further clarification. Like most of us, I sometimes (often?) fail to adequately express the totality of what I intend, and writing at 2:00 in the morning leaves me most susceptible to this failure.

A thoughtful response from a devout fellow Christian friend provokes this re-examination. He reminded me that “evolution” has not been proven beyond dispute. I believe he is correct insofar that scientists concede evolution does not answer every question about the creation of life. Further, within the scientific community there is debate over many aspects of evolution, for instance neutralism versus selectionism in molecular evolution; adaptationism; group selection; "Cambrian Explosion"; mass extinctions; interspecies competition; sexual selection; the evolution of sex itself and evolutionary psychology among others.

My citing the certainty of evolution was NOT that man necessarily evolved from a fish or from any disputed origin. It was only to observe the validity, the TRUTH, of evolutionary science, that which has been repeatedly proven and accepted as fact by those who have independently studied the subject.

As Eugenie Scott, director of the Oakland, California-based National Center for Science Education says, while those who study peer-reviewed scientific literature will find documented disagreements over the pattern and process of evolution, "they won't find arguments over whether living things have common ancestors.”

Intelligent Design on the other had has absolutely no scientific basis. It is based on philosophy and theology. Kenneth Miller, a biologist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island explains academia’s opposition to explanations that rely on God as a causal agent because such explanations go against the very definition of science: seeking a natural explanation for natural events and phenomenon.

The intelligent-design movement, Miller said, seeks to allow a non-natural explanation into science. "By altering the definition of science, they seek a playing field where the supernatural can have scientific meaning."

Personally I believe God started it all, somehow, some way. We have science to thank for answering some of “HOW” God works his miracles, whether it be the changeable nature of matter, or how a huge stalk of corn grows from tiny seeds in just a few months time.
Science sheds light on truth.

And what is God if not truth?

For now, like the wind that we cannot see but for the trees that wave, God’s reality shines forth from a child’s smiling face, a merciful donation or one of a billion examples of goodness and grace. Ironically, it is the honest pursuit of science that may eventually uncover the verifiable truth of God’s existence.

Yet will faith survive that day?

Intelligent Design: A Sinful Affront to God

Denial of reality on a personal level may be harmful, even deadly. But when foisted upon society by its political leaders it can lead to catastrophe.

The Republican/Bush insistence on denying proven science in favor of promoting the fiction of “Intelligent Design” is the latest such example. ID’s proponents are nothing more than propagandists with a creationist agenda to obliterate the wall between church and state.

There is not one shred of scientific evidence to prove their theory, which essentially is that life is so complex it just had to be intelligently designed. In one fell swoop they have dismissed centuries of hard, fact-based research that proves evolution beyond the slightest shadow of a doubt and, with Mr. Bush’s imprimatur, placed unproved and unproveable fiction on an equal plane with observable, repeatable, proven science.

Their abortion of reality follows the same playbook that sells wars on false premises, that rewards cronyism at great Public cost, and that disparages proven cooperative social democratic government for the equally proven disaster of trickle-down.

Like his other reality-denying actions, Bush’s equating ID with evolution is done on behalf of a favored constituency: his conservative religious base. After all, they deliver the votes that enable their democracy-killing lies on the issues that really matters.

This is the same philosophy that sees natural disasters as the Intelligent Designer’s retribution on evil humanity. It is dead-on the same as blaming terrorism on “they hate our freedoms,” while resolutely failing to look deeper and honestly by rationally asking “why?”

Scientific realism in no way diminishes God’s reality. The wondrous complexity of our universe is no less a miracle than it is a mystery. Only through our God-given power of reason and observation have we made what little sense we have of it to this point of our evolution. Replacing this knowledge with mythology is a true sacrilege to God, or in their words, the Intelligent Creator.

The seeds of their error are sewn by the very faith they profess, for the power of religion and belief in God is by FAITH in that which is unseen, unseeable and scientifically unproveable! As Jesus said (JN 20:29), “…Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.”

Moo on! RFD 10/13/05

Les Miserables en la Cour Supreme

John Roberts is smooth and smart. Newly nominated Harriet Miers may be as well. What they both share for sure, however, is their avowed promise to “follow the letter of the law.”

In this they answer the call of the “Justice Sunday” promoters to be non-activist strict constructionists of the law. In other words, they will make sacrosanct about any Act of Congress, regardless of how such Acts may interfere with more abstract Constitutional principles like “equal protection,” “due process,” “right of privacy” and the like.

Judge Roberts has already proved his mettle. He ruled that the police did not violate those pesky rights by arresting 12-year-old Ansche Hedgepeth for eating a single French fry on the Washington Metro.

ONE FRENCH FRY, and the young girl was handcuffed, searched, hauled in a windowless police cruiser to a juvenile facility, FINGERPRINTED, and arrested! . Perversely, had she been an adult she would have been issued a ticket and released on the spot

And Roberts APPROVED this outrage as a judge on the District of Columbia Court of Appeals!

The esteemed chief justice John Roberts termed the eating of a French fry a “delinquent” act that warranted her arrest. It seems incredible that one who would so judge will sit as the leader of our nation's highest court.

His callous neglect of compassion and humane rationality brought to
mind another notorious stickler for the law, Joubert, the heartless pursuer of the saintly Jean Valjean in Les Miserable.

Judges judge, plain and simple. Their duty is to insure that laws are in accord with the spirit of our Bill of Rights. To simply accept a law, because the legislature passed it is NOT judging, it is rubber stamping, and it is a total abdication of their job to interpret the Constitution in light of the laws that lawmakers pass, state or federal.

Without this judgment “separate but equal” in education would still be force, there’d be no right to remain silent, no protection against discrimination and unfettered arrests of 12-year-old girls who eat French fries.

There is only one way an honest, intelligent judge can be “activist”: by refusing to judge. Rfd 10/4/05