Father’s Day versus fatherhood

I am cynical about the day called Father’s Day.   For most of my life, I have seen it as yet another store-sponsored holiday.  America traditionally “celebrates” Father’s Day by buying trinkets from a store.   I can’t think of a better way to degrade any occasion.

Father’s Day has become something much more meaningful to me since I became a father, but it is not about receiving trinkets bought at stores. I write this fully aware that there are other, more comprehensive, ways of interpreting the trinkets.

What is it to be a father?  Like most things in life, being a father is not about being brilliant.  It’s mostly about pacing yourself.  It’s about staying reasonably focused over the long-haul.  It’s about dealing with fatigue.  It’s been about repeatedly saying “no” to one’s momentary desires in order to accomplish something much more important in the long run.

I envisioned this blog to be a place for ideas.  For that reason, I’ve minimized revealing much information about my family.  It’s not that I’m not crazy about my family. I am.  I adore my wife and children.  It’s just that I’ve tried to respect their privacy. Then again, writing about events from six years ago doesn’t quite seem quite so invasive.  Therefore, I’m using this post about my real life children to illustrate the idea of parenthood.

It is true that being a father is about bringing home a paycheck to feed and clothes little children.   Therefore, being a father can sometimes …

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Shhhhh . . . don’t mention drinking . . . . it just killed him that’s all –

We of "Cardinal Nation" here in St. Louis suffered the loss of relief pitcher Josh Hancock this last weekend. In case you haven't heard, he was killed when he crashed his SUV full-speed into the back of a tow-truck on the highway. The tow truck was stopped, lights blazing in…

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When I die, what happens online?

I’ve taken something of an accidental hiatus from the blog the past few months. “Real life” responsibilities left me rather distracted, and without a word, I “disappeared” from the face of the earth, as far as everyone at Dangerous Intersection knew anyway. Or, in my view, Dangerous Intersection perhaps “disappeared” from my radar. Either way, a community of people with whom I had communicated, traded knowledge and ideas suddenly vanished from the world entirely, and I from it. Because DI does not occupy the real world in any tangible sense for me, when I neglected it, it nigh did cease to exist. And likewise, I did not exist to the people who have known me only through it.

This concept got me thinking about the expanse of telecommunications we have in our hands, and what it may mean for real human relationships. Can we define faraway, supposed acquaintances who can vanish from our knowledge at any time (as I did) as “friends”? And, as this post’s title muses, what happens to my online network of psuedobuddies when I leave, or die?

I don’t mean to downplay the potential of online communication. People made due for centuries maintaining meaningful relationships with mere pen-pals, using a far less forgiving medium and time-frame. I think of the letters exchanged between the likes of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, for years upon years, across many miles, maintaining a friendship and respect nearly across the grave, as it turned out. Thus it can clearly …

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Why Republicans deny global warming.

Jonathan Chait of Common Dreams raises a good question: why do Republicans disagree with climate scientists more at a time when climate scientists are accruing new terrifying evidence that human activities are truly responsible for warming the atmosphere? 

Last year, the National Journal asked a group of Republican senators and House members: “Do you think it’s been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the Earth is warming because of man-made problems?” Of the respondents, 23% said yes, 77% said no . . . So, the magazine asked the question again last month. The results? Only 13% of Republicans agreed that global warming has been proved.

As the evidence for global warming gets stronger, Republicans are actually getting more skeptical. . . . How did it get this way? The easy answer is that Republicans are just tools of the energy industry. It’s certainly true that many of them are. . . But the financial relationship doesn’t quite explain the entirety of GOP skepticism on global warming. For one thing, the energy industry has dramatically softened its opposition to global warming over the last year, even as Republicans have stiffened theirs.

The truth is more complicated — and more depressing: A small number of hard-core ideologues (some, but not all, industry shills) have led the thinking for the whole conservative movement . . .Conservatives defer to a tiny handful of renegade scientists who reject the overwhelming professional consensus.

In other words, the thinking process of most Republicans is worse than …

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Stop Writing?

Below is a link to a blog called 101 Reasons to Stop Writing.  It is a blog about writing and actually does have a list of reasons to stop, which, when one considers the amount of verbiage being generated by the human race, might seem like an impossible challenge.  Those…

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