I am in three classes at the church at the moment.  In Sunday School, we are studying “The Uppity Women of the Bible”.  We have only covered Ruth, so far, and it’s fascinating.  I’ll put a post together on what I’ve learned at some point because it is really fun!  I’m in a class on John Wesley which has turned out to be wonderful in terms of the members of the class.  One woman is getting her degree in theology and another in world religions at UT.  The woman teaching the class has a degree in theology so it’s a very informed group of people.  They know much more about Wesley than do I, so I am learning a lot and have been relieved to discover that almost everyone has read Spong, Borg, Rohr, etc.  I had a brief, but very interesting conversation with a well-read gentleman on the differences between Spong and Wesley.  I was thankful to have recently completed Spong’s book Eternal Life because I was fully able to understood the point he was making – that Wesley, Borg, Rohr, etc. are all willing to break down Christianity. But they don’t just deconstruct it and leave it deconstructed as does Spong.  They re-mythologize it, so to speak.

I’m not exactly sure what my thoughts are on re-mythologizing religion, although I very much appreciated Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov and think that was what the book was primarily about – re-mythologizing the sacraments in terms that do not conflict with reason and science.  It made sense to me!   Ken Wilber has some interesting articles on why he is against re-mythologizing religion, but I haven’t read enough of Wilber to fully understand his point or if it has anything to do with a Dostoevskyan reframing of the sacraments.  I’ll have to get around to doing that one of these days.

I am also in an Intro. to Spiritual Directions class and this one is posing the most trouble for me.  I am so scared of offending people with my non-belief.  Most people in the class wouldn’t be offended at all, but I can tell that some would, so I don’t really say what’s on my mind and the point of the class is to lay bare what is on your mind.

So what’s on my mind these days?  I’m worried about my health.  Not horribly worried – just worried.  I think I’m more angry with myself than anything.  Why did I allow myself to get to this point?  I keep telling myself not to go there – that it isn’t helpful.  Move on from where it is you are at and don’t look back because the past serves no helpful purpose.  It will simply keep me stuck.  Forgive and move on.  No point in thinking about what could have been.  What is, is.  I suppose there is nothing offensive about that.

But here is what is really on my mind…. I’m worried about a Catholic Retreat my husband is going to attend in March.  I actually woke him up at an ungodly hour this morning to talk with him about it.  His family is involved in a very conservative movement within Roman Catholicism and they have been hounding us for the past 10 years to attend one of the movement retreats.  Neither of us have had any interest.  But just as soon as we join the Methodist Church, my husband’s brother talks him into going on a retreat.  Why would he agree to that now?  Is it some subconscious thing with my husband – that he feels guilty about joining a protestant church?

When we were first married, he would get very angry with me for my issues with the Catholic Church.  For eight years, religion was a huge struggle for us.  I finally decided that I had to leave the Catholic Church and if that meant the end of our marriage (which I really thought it might), so be it.  But it didn’t.  I ended up very involved in a Methodist Church and enrolled in theology school.  But before I even had a chance to attend, my husband decided he was unhappy with his job and made the decision to move us back to Texas.  I can’t help but think there is some subconscious thing going on here.  So I woke the poor guy up in the middle of the night and asked him what made him decide to go on the retreat now, after 10 years of having no interest?  He promises me that he still isn’t particularly interested.  He’s just doing it because he thinks it’s a way to connect with his brother.  He claims to have no interest in going back to Catholicism again, that he’s very excited about our new church.  I’ll be happy when the danged retreat is finally over, however.  If anything has the potential to break us up, it’s religion.  Which is kind of ironic because it has always been spirituality, from the beginning of our dating days, that  has been our glue.  Maybe we are solid enough these days that we could follow our own spiritual paths and not have to travel them together so there is no reason to worry, anyway?   Both of my kids are teens now, and both are firm atheists. There are no worries of being forced to raise my kids in a religion I feel uncomfortable with.  Truth be known, I’m much more comfortable with my kids’ atheism than my husband’s family’s theism.  I can’t help but wonder if that would be found offensive in my group, however, so I don’t share it, even though it is seriously on my mind.

We’re attending a fairly traditional United Methodist Church.  It’s far more traditional than anything we’ve been involved with for probably 15 years!  Yet, in our search for a Methodist community, every minister has introduced themselves to us by their first name – not even with a “pastor” preceding it.    A church we visited in Round Rock, Texas (an extremely homophobic part of the world) all agreed, without much argument, to become a Reconciling Community.   They were surprised at how impressed we were with their willingness to accept the label since only one other Methodist church in Austin has been willing to take it on.   For them, it was just plain, common sense and they don’t see anything bold or courageous about it.  It’s a little too traditional for us in terms of theology, but what a fantastic community!

The church we are joining is not a Reconciling community.  But we both feel incredibly drawn to it, for some reason. It just feels like the right thing to do at this point in our lives.  I can’t tell you why and I don’t even want to try.  Maybe five years from now it will make sense.   Then again, maybe I’m simply finally learning to live life without insisting that it make sense.

In a recent plane ride home from Rhode Island, a woman in front of me was explaining how to work Sudoku puzzles.  She was a patient teacher and I was soon able to complete my own puzzles.   At first, it was very enjoyable.  But as I do with almost everything, I turned it into a job, having to prove to myself I was worthy of completing the most difficult puzzles and that I could get them right.

I have now completed every single puzzle available on my Centro and I’m all the way up to the Diabolical puzzles.   For every other level, I could easily ascertain the patterns and have most puzzles finished in under 15 minutes.  Not so with the Diabolical puzzles.  These are tough!   I get stuck and can’t figure out how to solve them.  I finally succombed to reading Sudoku tips on-line and there are ways you can add the figures to decide which number fits best in whatever square.  But I don’t want to have to do that!  The other alternative the tips suggest is to guess.

GUESS???  I don’t want to have to guess!  Sudoku had me hooked because everything made sense.  On all of the levels before Diabolical, no matter how difficult, the patterns quickly became apparent and all the numbers eventually fell perfectly into place.  Guessing means you might have to get something wrong before you can get it right.   I don’t like things like that.  I don’t want to have to get things wrong.  But if I do, I usually have a string of back-up plans – just in case.

I think it was Edison who said that he hadn’t failed, he’d just figured out 10,000 ways that didn’t work.   I can assure you I’m not Edison.  I get something wrong and I immediately think of myself as an idiot and failure.   Which is probably why I’ve never invented anything.   But I guess that’s the way puzzles work, sometimes.  You have to keep trying different pieces until you find that one that fits.

Do you suppose our lives are like that?  Like puzzles?  Are there pieces that fit and that don’t fit?  I think that is what I was probably taught – that there is a completed picture at some distant place and time and if I mind my p’s and q’s and don’t mess up, I’ll put everything together in the right way and will be rewarded with that completed picture. Everything will make sense.

I’m beginning to realize, however, that life just doesn’t work like this.  After 20 years of marriage, you can’t go back in time and try someone else and see if it works better.    Divorce statistics are higher for each subsequent marriage which suggests that chances are good the second marriage will be just as bad as the first, and possibly worse.   My second marriage, however, was much better than the first.  So maybe the third would be even better?   Probably not.   I’m perfectly happy in my marriage until I start wondering if there might be a better fit for me out there (the piece that will complete the puzzle).

You can’t take your kids back to the time they were 5 and put them in a different school to see if that makes their lives “better”.    There is no way to measure these things.  If you made the decision to put your kids in public school, what is the point of wondering if private school would have been better?   There is no way to know what the “right” way is.   We may decide to take a different route with our younger child.  Or our kids may decide they will do things one way or another for their kids, based on their personal experiences.  But they can’t know if this will be “better” for their kids, either.  It’s simply a choice we make given our experience and available information.

Maybe life isn’t a puzzle?  If so, maybe it’s OK to quit searching so frantically for that perfect piece?  Maybe we can simply enjoy the process as it unfolds, however imperfect it may be.

Parker Palmer is a Quaker and seem to me to be a bit more mystically based than Howard Macy.  Macy is a bit more snug in his orthodoxy.  For whatever reason, I’m always far more comfortable with those who aren’t so comfortable, and Palmer definitely isn’t a preacher of comfort!

Palmer tells us:  “Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you.  Before you tell your life what truths and values you have intended to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.”

Not so easy to do, is it?  I don’t know about you, but I’ve been encouraged to set short term and long term goals for as long as I can remember, and this was done with what I wanted to achieve in mind.  I don’t ever remember being encouraged to listen to my life.  Just the opposite!  I was taught to take control of my life.

Of course, here I am, 46 years old, and that hasn’t exactly worked for me.  I mean, it would be nice if I was in control.  But the older I get, the more I realize that “control” is a sort of modern pathology. We’ve been coming at it completely backwards for years!

Palmer says that Frederick Buechner defines vocation as “the place where your deepest gladness meets the world’s deepest needs.”

Could you even imagine having that which makes you glad meet the deepest needs of the world?  Is that even possible?  I don’t know about you, but I live in a world where the vocation of most people has far more to do with simply getting by than meeting personal gladness with the needs of the world!  What a concept!  But somewhere in you, doesn’t it sort of resonate as true?  The systems of our world are falling apart because they no longer provide meaning.  Life hardly seems worth living if what is ultimately meaningful to us doesn’t likewise meet some deep need within the world.

Palmer tells us that “our strongest gifts are usually those we are barely aware of possessing.  They are part of our God-given nature, with us from the moment we drew first breath, and we are no more conscious of having them than we are of breathing.”

I tend to think of myself as uneducated.  Yet I have a degree n Education from one of the more prominent schools in Texas.  I suppose I should be proud of it, but I’m not.  It didn’t take much to get the degree.  I didn’t even really have to show up to classes.  But since then, I’ve been studying my butt off, simply because I’m interested in the subject.  People frequently tell me they are intimidated by me because I am far more educated than they are, and this always flabergasts me, because I don’t have much of formal education at all. (Being taught to teach secondary education in the public school system is a trade – not an actual education.)  What education I have has been primarily self-taught and I don’t have any degrees to show for it.  But since the time I was 9 years old, I’ve been exploring theology, simply because I find it fascinating.  And I do tend to take my knowledge for granted. I tend to think that what I know, everyone knows.  Yet, I am told repeatedly that I have a way of presenting things that would otherwise be very difficult for them to understand.

So – it makes me wonder?  Did I pursue a degree in education because I was telling my life what I wanted to do with it?  Or because my life was telling me what it wanted to do with me?  I’m not sure the distinction is so easily determined!

Palmer says: “My anxiety about way not opening, the anxiety that kept me pounding on closed doors, almost presented me from seeing the secret hidden in plain sight; I was already standing on the ground of my new life, ready to take the next step on my journey, if only I would turn around and see the landscape that lay before me.”

Palmer says, “We must take the no of the way that closes and find the guidance it has to offer – and take the yes of the way that opens and respond with the yes of our lives.”

I guess that’s where I’m at right now.   I’ve been reluctantly accepting the “no” and not it’s time to take the “yes”.

It reminded me of an issue my daughter encountered when she was very young.  A bunch of kids were out in the front yard stamping on ants and other insects they found.  My daughter was appalled and made the statement that these animals could be their great grandparents for all they knew.   I’m not sure where she got that idea because it isn’t a view we subscribed to, but it’s a good question – why be disrespectful toward the ants and other insects?   We really don’t know that much about them.

It instigated a discussion about heaven and the absolute fact, according to these kids, that bugs and animals don’t go to heaven.  Therefore, you can do what you want with them.  A further insinuation was made that my daughter was “evil” for for suggesting bugs might have been human beings in another life.

It was Christmas-time, and she received a “gift” from a little girl, about 5 years old who had been involved in the discussion.   It was a picture of Santa Claus giving coal to my daughter.  My daughter thought it was hilarious.  But I was horrified!   My daughter’s compassion was being condemned by this child’s Christian brainwashing!

It makes me wonder, sometimes, if our disrespect toward animals wasn’t born in a misinterpretation of Genesis?  Or maybe it’s just a bizarre interpretation of the ancient Hebrew that eschewed stewardship and misinterpreted dominion as some sort of absolute dominance?    The Hebrew Bible says we are supposed to be the stewards of the land and has all kinds of laws for the ethical killing of animals, if they must be killed.   You don’t just kill animals because you are human and they aren’t!    Perhaps we do have dominion, but does that give us the authority to do as we please?  Does that even make sense?   Would God be so pleased with his creations if he created one to mindlessly destroy all others?  It just doesn’t make sense.

The problem is that youth doesn’t respect authority.  And frankly, that seems to me fair enough.  Many of the people who are telling our youth what to do don’t have lives the youth admire.  Plus, many in authority are perceived as having made a mess of things.   But there is a big difference between rebelling and resisting.

It is likely that resistance is an important aspect of youth in some circumstances.  But it becomes problematic when it is nothing more than rebellion.   And if the reason kids take drugs is to resist authority, then that’s rebellion, not resistance.    Resistance would be taking drugs because you enjoy the effect despite the fact that authority insists you “just say no to drugs”, not because you don’t want authority telling you what to do.

So what I wonder is this – is there a correlation between addiction and rebellion against authority?  What we rebel against we tend to strengthen.  Kids don’t want authority telling them what to do so they take drugs and when they end up addicted, they have basically substituted one authority for another.  The drugs now control their lives and the “authority” of the addiction makes resistance extremely difficult.

This seems to me to apply to all sorts of aspects of life, but more on that later.

Everything was about external motivation.  Instead of raising money for the school because it made you feel good to do something for your school, the kids were encouraged to raise money to win stuff.   There was a whole system and with the biggest contributors getting to stand in a booth with swirling “money” in front of the student body.  For 30 seconds, or whatever it was, the “winner” (those who had raised the most money) caught all the “money” they could and won all the little prizes that were indicated on the “money”.    What does that teach a child – especially since this was done as a special school assembly?

Every week, two of us went head to head on these issues but got nowhere.   We had started really small, too.  The PTA would give candy to all of the kids whose parents had become members.  They did this very publicly and with ceremony in the classrooms in front of all the other students to try and get those kids to get their parents to become members so they could get candy, too.   For the most part, this school was fairly wealthy, but it had it’s share of kids who were living with multiple families in 1 and 2 bedroom apartment.  It just didn’t seem appropriate for the PTA to encourage membership in this way.   Even if there was no poverty within the school, this didn’t seem appropriate to us.  But no one was at all interested in our concern.  Not even the teachers!

I totally lost it when students were asked to bring teddy bears for the kids who were in a cancer hospital.   How difficult is it to get kids to do something nice for other kids?  In my experience, it isn’t that difficult!    But the PTA didn’t trust the altruism of the students so told the kids that whichever classroom contributed the most teddy bears got a pizza party!

You do in order to get.  The reason you go to school is to make sure you will become successful little producers and consumers.   Unfortunately, this is also applied to what might otherwise be opportunities for altruistic acts of kindness.  Those acts become about producing and consuming, too.

Anyway, that’s a tangent and explains, in part, why we decided to homeschool.  I wanted my kids to be able to think for themselves.  Whether they do that or not, I can’t say yet.   It seems that they do, but the real test will be adulthood.  They are both in the public education system, now.  This is my daughter’s first year in the system and she has received two “good citizenship” awards.  Her most recent award allows her to choose a friend and they can eat lunch outside rather than having to stay in the cafeteria.   She got to do this for the first time last Friday and she said she felt like she had been let out of prison because they were outdoors with no monitors.   She said it was amazing to be outside and to watch all of the animals that are free, coming and going as they please.  She is at school voluntarily – it was her decision to go back – she wanted to experience it.   But most kids aren’t in school voluntarily – they have no choice in the matter.

It just makes me wonder – what does this do to the psyche of our kids?

The reason I got to thinking about this was because I decided to find out more about Phil Zimbardo’s work and found the an interesting discussion by Zimbardo on TedTalks.     Good people do evil things all the time.   The line between good and evil is permeable:  good and evil are the yin and yang of the human condition.  Zimbardo says the problem is that we’ve been dealing with “evil” at the individual level and that doesn’t work.  We have to deal with systems.    Zimbardo defines evil as “the exercise of power to intentionally harm people psychologically, to hurt people physically, to destroy people mortally (or ideas), or to commit crimes against humanity”.  The question should never be “who” is responsible.  It should be “what” is responsible because the power is always in the system.    Basically, evil is the willingness of people to blindly obey authority.   Americans may think they are independent individuals, but study after study shows that two-thirds of us are willing to push that electric shock button all the way up to 450 volts!

I’m off to the library tomorrow to take back The Time Paradox and pick up Zimbardo’s other book, The Lucifer Effect. 

I admit to feeling somewhat nervous about where we’re headed even though sometimes I think I’d love to give up my suburban lifestyle to live off the grid somewhere. I sometimes have visions of Grapes of Wrath and the horror stories of poverty and eating nothing but pinto beans for months on end my grandmother told about life during the Great Depression. Sometimes, the visions are more like something out of Mad Max. Truth be known, I’ve been scared of an economic crash my entire adult existence.

I have noticed, over the years (and years), that it is extremely difficult for me to accept that I might actually deserve “the good life”. I have always imagined the sunset of my life will be toil and drudgery so I’m forever waiting for the economic bottom to fall out from underneath me. I know it’s irrational and that my feelings are not a prediction of current events. But I have to wonder – how many of us have been living with this irrational fear? I tend to be very practical because of it, but it would make sense that people would take crazy advantage of the good times if they think the bottom will eventually fall out from under them. Especially if they deny the fear.

I know exactly where this idea came from, too, because once upon a time I was absolutely convinced that money was the root of all evil and I spent a lot of time working through my thoughts on that. Money has no inherent value. It’s what people do with it and their relationship to it that creates the meaning it has for each of us. Anyway, I am quite certain this distrust of money has maternal roots. One day in high school, I had the gall to propose that people were driven by what makes them happy. This made my mother physically angry because she hadn’t raised me to believe the purpose of life is happiness. She had raised me to know that the purpose of life is hard work! That good old Puritan work ethic.

Remember Calvin, one the Puritan’s most beloved theologians? He said that salvation was pre-ordained and that there was nothing you could do to be saved. You were either chosen by God, or you weren’t. And although I find it unlikely that he taught it, the result of his teaching was the idea that the best you could do was look like you were one of the chosen through piety and hard work which would bring prosperity. Financial prosperity, of course, was equated with being blessed by God (unless, of course, you used that financial security as an excuse to sit on our ass and act pompous). Voila, hard work becomes the very meaning of life. The Puritan work ethic and capitalism were a match made in heaven. Capitalism probably wouldn’t have flourished in the U.S. like it did without Puritanism.

I have a deep admiration for much of the Puritan ethic and fully realize we have every reason to be grateful for the hard work ethic of our ancestors. But this ethic becomes problematic when material abundance (and especially material excess) becomes equated with proof that we are blessed by God (or the universe or whatever).

Hard work doesn’t always bequeath financial prosperity. You can be struck down by a heart attack because of all that work. Does the hard work remain meaningful? Or maybe you are a Mexican immigrant who works 90 hour plus weeks just to barely make ends meet, but can never get ahead. It’s definitely hard work, but is it meaningful? And is it absolutely true that financial prosperity provides meaning?

I tend to agree, life is more meaningful to me when I am engaged in meaningful work. But hard work itself doesn’t provide meaning. Sometimes, it just makes life extremely difficult and ages you before your time. Plus, it’s become a national distraction. We are all so incredibly busy that we barely have time to stop and think about the consequences of all our frantic production and consumption.

Even though I don’t have a lot of it and live a fairly modest life, I have an obsession with money. I do not have a healthy relationship with it. I have had abundance most of my life, and I have not been grateful for it because I’ve been preoccupied with losing it. And because I am so obsessed with losing it, I’m afraid to seek out meaningful work. I’ve been taking care of my kids needs and my husband’s needs for 17 years and it’s my turn to do something for myself but because I’m afraid of the economic downturn, I’ve been trying to talk myself into getting the practical, meaningless 8 to 5 job that will pay the bills rather than going back to school to prepare myself for an engaging career. Maybe it’s a warranted fear, but maybe it’s not. My husband’s job seems stable enough, even if he’s not going to get a bonus or raise this year. But I have a difficult time convincing myself that I’m worth it. I helped my husband financially when he was getting his Masters degree and he is more than willing to do the same for me. So why is it I could so easily relinquish “my turn”?

I’m scared. I’m being driven by fear. I lack courage. I’m a coward.

I’m so tired of being cowardly!

I don’t know exactly what you mean by 2012.  Doomsday, the Great Cycle, the Mayan Calendar?

These are my thoughts on the little I know about it.  I’m not into prophecy or providence and think any attempt to say “this is what it means” is a lower form of consciousness and not a higher form.  It’s based on the old patriarchal model.  Like what Christians did to the Jews by turning Jesus into the fulfilment of Old Testament Prophecy – it implies that the meaning existed prior to our interpretation of it.  We are moving beyond that sort of understanding to the realization that we create all the meaning everything has.

I think it’s reasonable that societies have tapped into cosmic & geological patterns.  Plato clearly had some sort of understanding from having read the ancients of his time period that there was a “Great Cycle”.  But he’s our only source for that wisdom so any speculation is just that – speculation.

Seems perfectly plausible to me, too, that  human consciousness and awareness ebbs and flows, like everything else.  If we just look at ourselves as microcosms of the process, we can recognize a similar cycle.  You get to a new level of understanding that won’t allow you to go back to your old understanding.  But once at that new level, it’s like starting all over again.  We come out of the dark into the light, but once we get comfy in the light we cycle back into the dark again.  We never actually arrive in a permanent state of being because no such state exists (because time doesn’t exist).  We are on a constant journey of becoming.  It’s a continual process of overcoming habitual patterns which are always based on fear of the unknown.  We get comfy with our present understanding of ourselves so have to be disoriented from time to time in order to be part of the creation process.

I first learned of the Great Cycle through C.S. Lewis because he uses a lot of Great Cycle mythology in the Narnia series.  So does Tolkien in Lord of the Rings.   Contemporary humanity is, for the most part, primed for the Great Cycle myth thanks to modern day myth makers who were experts on ancient mythology.

I’ve been somewhat involved in Integral Spirituality which makes use of the spiral dynamic model.  Remember Carol Gilligan’s hierarchical model from Psych 101? It’s very similar. Clearly, humanity is about to make a big leap in consciousness levels because so many people are currently functioning at the Second Tier Meme and the number is growing rapidly.  A critical mass could occur any time and we’ll leave the patriarchal First Tier model for something entirely new.  That’s not New Age magic, just plain old psychology.
.
Could be the Mayan Calendar predicted this shift.  People make the link because the Mayan calendar starts over again in 2012.  They had a very accurate calendar so it was likely based on some observed pattern.   But to say what that pattern was with absolute certainty would be patriarchal First Tier Model thinking so is problematic.  (The Doomsday model that says something has created meaning for us and we are at its’ mercy rather than the understanding that everything is benign and it is we who give it all the meaning it has.)

There does seem to be some geological support for the Mayan calendar.   I saw a show on NOVA a while back about the flipping of the magnetic poles.  The scientists said it was possible that the Mayans had calculated that pattern.  But it’s been 700,000 years since the last magnetic flip and it doesn’t seem to be something any society has been around long enough to predict with 100% accuracy.  We’re probably going through the flip now (it takes thousands of years to accomplish).  But most don’t think it will be doomsday.  Experiments with birds show that they reorient themselves within days.  Plus, there are lots of species who have survived several of these flips – like sea turtles.

If the calendar does accurately predict some pattern, 2012 will still only mean whatever it is we decide it means.  The meaing does not exist outside our interpretation of it.

I think I felt the divide especially strong because I live in an extremely Red state and my little neighborhood was likewise extremely Red.   77% of the citizens considered themselves Conservative Christian Republicans.  After 9/11, anyone who didn’t agree with Bush was both “ungodly” and “unpatriotic”.

I started blogging not so much to work through politics, but to work through my religion that had become so heavily tied to American politics.    You don’t question God or country in these parts and I was questioning both which was starting to make me feel a bit cray!   Thank God for the blogging community!!

Things have obviously changed a lot over the years.   It’s such relief to know that the majority of Americans wanted Obama for President.  I can’t even begin to say what a relief that is.  I didn’t realize how nervous I had been about this election until he was voted into office.  I cried, and cried, and cried.

I don’t think he is a providential President, nor do I think he thinks of himself in that way.  (I no longer think there is any such thing.)  I also don’t think he’s going to walk in and work miracles.  We’ve got a mess and it’s going to take a lot of patience to work it all out.   But I do think his election to the Presidency is a sign that America is becoming more balanced again.

Of course, I still live in an extremely red state.    McCain won here by over 1 million votes (popular vote).   Thankfully, I live just outside of a little dot of blue in a sea of red; and a lot of those people who used to live in that dot of blue have been moving into our area which is making it somewhat purple. 

My son said that students were yelling “Obama” up and down the halls at school, yesterday.   We had a long talk last night.  For half of their lives, Bush has been President.  He says that a lot of kids have a very strong sense of hoplessness.   They worry about living in a violent society.  They worry about people dying unnecessarily and worry that they may one day be asked to die for their country unnecessarily.  They worry about the environment in the hands of people who don’t seem to care about it’s future.  They worry about life having meaning for them.  Obama has given them hope that life can be meaningful.

Obama’s election has renewed my faith in America!