Our culture of distraction

I remember the good old days, when I received a dozen or so emails every day at the office, thereby obviating the need to send and receive paper letters on those matters. Then something unproductive happened. As I started getting more and more emails, I found that they were becoming more fragmented, like stretched-out conversations, and more lost in a sea of emails that tried to sell me something or tried to make sure that I was constantly updated as to nothing very important. Keeping up with email, then, has become both an incredible tool and a huge time drain. I think of that every day as I read and create 100 emails, many of which require detailed responses. Email, which was once a way to avoid sending and receiving paper letters, is now taking up several hours of every day. Why don't I turn it off and get a lot more done? Because, every day, I end up decided that I don't want to throw out the baby with the bath-water. I love-hate the way email barely often enough distracts my attention to something that barely often enough requires my attention. Sam Anderson explores our new attention-divided culture in a New York Magazine article titled, "In Defense of Distraction":

This is troubling news, obviously, for a culture of BlackBerrys and news crawls and Firefox tabs—tools that, critics argue, force us all into a kind of elective ADHD. The tech theorist Linda Stone famously coined the phrase “continuous partial attention” to describe our newly frazzled state of mind. American office workers don’t stick with any single task for more than a few minutes at a time; if left uninterrupted, they will most likely interrupt themselves. Since every interruption costs around 25 minutes of productivity, we spend nearly a third of our day recovering from them. We keep an average of eight windows open on our computer screens at one time and skip between them every twenty seconds.

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Parents Support Transgendered Child

An eight-year-old child in Omaha, Nebraska, the middle of three boys, has told his parents throughout his life that he is a she. Since he learned to talk, he has said, daily, that he is really a girl. His parents have come to believe him, and are letting him begin the next school term in a new school, as a girl, with a new name. Ben-turned-Katie will not be allowed back in his Catholic elementary school. According to the priest in the parish, since the Catholic Church believes a person is born one gender and cannot change, his appearance at school would lead to too many questions and cause discomfort for the other children. It might, of course. Certainly it would raise all kinds of questions, yes. Hard questions, the kind that parents aren't sure how to answer. My guess is, though, that if the school called in an expert on the subject and held an assembly in which the child's situation is explained in brief and concrete terms and the other children were allowed to ask any questions they had, parents were allowed to attend, etc., the issue could be handled and put to rest. Children that age are amazingly accepting, and what a wonderful life lesson it could be. That is how it would be handled in our school - or similarly, somehow - one of the many reasons we are there. In watching the video, I was struck by the dedication of these parents to their child. I am so relieved, on Katie's behalf, that she has this kind of support. In conservative Nebraska, this can't be easy. I wish them well, and thank them for being the kind of parents every kid deserves to have. Unconditional love at its finest.

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God and Greed

In "Why Do Christians Worship Greed?" Peter Laarman puts his finger on yet another ugly-Americanism:

Only in America can one find significant numbers of serious Christian theologians who will still argue that unfettered capitalism represents God's Plan for human thriving.

Contemporary Republicans have worked extra hard concoct their stunted Money-God. Laarman quotes David Brooks:

The Republicans talk more about the market than about society, more about income than quality of life. They celebrate capitalism, which is a means, and are inarticulate about the good life, which is the end. They take things like tax cuts, which are tactics that are good in some circumstances, and elevate them to holy principle, to be pursued in all circumstances.

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A wedding observation

I attended a wedding over the weekend. My family is Italian and I'm sure it's no surprise that we are overwhelmingly Catholic. However, because the ceremony wasn't being held in a church but rather in the reception hall I had thought that I would be spared having to sit through another Catholic mass. I was wrong. *sigh* As it turns out, it was a thankfully shortened version of the ceremony. I noticed that, even in abbreviated form, the priest managed to mention FIVE TIMES (we counted) that,"...God made us MALE and FEMALE so that we may join together in His love". It would have been just another day in a big Italian Catholic family except this time, seated right up front were two good friends of the bride and groom who also happened to be a lesbian couple. I've seen "the lesbian couple", as they are called in the family, a few times at family gatherings that were large enough to encompass all of us. They have been together for many years, at least as long as many of the other couples in the room. Longer than some. I couldn't help but cringe each time the phrase rolled around.

"Marriage was created by God for MALE and FEMALE...", "We join in holy matrimony this MAN and WOMAN...", etc.
With each repetition of the phrase it seemed that the priest was emphasizing it more and more and from our vantage point several rows back it almost seemed like he was glaring at the lesbian couple when he said it. (Probably my imagination.)

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The toll of permanent war

What is the domestic damage done by a country that lurches from war to war? Chris Hedges proposes an answer at Truthdig.com: countries that are perennially at war get eaten up from the inside out:

It is a state of permanent war that is finishing off the liberal traditions in Israel and the United States. The moral and intellectual trolls—the Dick Cheneys, the Avigdor Liebermans, the Mahmoud Ahmadinejads—personify the moral nihilism of perpetual war. They manipulate fear and paranoia. They abolish civil liberties in the name of national security. They crush legitimate dissent. They bilk state treasuries. They stoke racism.

“War,” Randolph Bourne commented acidly, “is the health of the state.”

Hedges further alleges that Obama is not in a hurry to stop the wars, because it's too much of an uphill climb and it's, in the long run, beneficial to Obama (as it was to Bush):

They support its destructive fury because it funds them. They validate its evil assumptions because to take them on is political suicide. They repeat the narrative of fear because it keeps us dormant. They do this because they have become weaker than the corporate forces that profit from permanent war.

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