Out The Window

Liberty without learning is always in peril; learning without liberty is always in vain.
- John F. Kennedy

An email doing the rounds:

When Minister Joe Wright was asked to open the new session of the Kansas Senate, everyone was expecting the usual generalities, but this is what they heard.

"Heavenly Father, We come before you today To ask your forgiveness and to seek your direction and guidance. We know Your Word says, "Woe to those who call evil good," but that is exactly what we have done. We have lost our spiritual equilibrium and reversed our values. We have exploited the poor and called it the lottery. We have rewarded laziness and called it welfare. We have killed our unborn and called it choice. We have shot abortionists and called it justifiable. We have neglected to discipline our children and called it building self esteem. We have abused power and called it politics. We have coveted our neighbor's possessions and called
it ambition. We have polluted the air with profanity and pornography and called it freedom of speech and expression. We have ridiculed the time-honored values of our forefathers and called it enlightenment.

"Search us, Oh, God, and know our hearts today; cleanse us from every sin and set us free. Amen!'

"The response was immediate. A number of legislators walked out during the prayer in protest."

Can't imagine why this email caused so much fuss.

When we're there, peering out the window during the long struggle, skating out from beneath threatening waves, clinging to fragments of knowledge and self-defnition that had long been eroded, these were the fragile times, not just when nothing was of comfort but when we could know no other path. The catastrophe was deep and immediate. The pain seemed eternal, the depth charges barely touching the ocean of lead, the deep floor on which he scuttled, trying to survive in the leadan atmosphere of the planet. There was nothing he could do but hope for a brief consciousness. There was certainly no way to live a normal, happy life. Sex was distorted, everything was distorted. See yourself as God sees you, went the instructions, and all there were were flimsy souls on the surface of a toxic planet. We were only suh forms of intelligence.

These despairing thoughts were his bread and butter, the soul he had made in a self-destructive life, a glimmering of distorted consciousness that was so quasar like in its rapidity and short-life, its scientific mystery, its obscure beauty and its fleeting smallness against a giant cosmos; these things were so fragmentary that even now he found it hard to gather strength, to marshal the forces, to survive.

If anything, the renewed efforts to be a fuller self were failing. There was little that could be said. There still seemed no way out. He was still expecting calamity. The brutality of it all was just as unkind. The size of things was just as out of proportion, the giant skidding thoughts, the complex plot lines, the screaching well of discontent; all were insignificant in the face of a broader truth.

He scuttled along the surface. The houses had been washed away. He instinctively sought somewhere to hide, as he had always done, but there was nowhere. He was being crushed by the weight of the atmosphere. He needed a protecting shell but it had been blasted away in a previous storm. He cried out for help but the sound would not carry through the leaden atmosphere. His consciousness flickered, he dashed around in the search for shelter, he tried to survive; and then, promptly, he was gone, disappearing as rapidly as he had been born.


THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/20/us/politics/20cnd-campaign.html?hp

Senator Barack Obama decisively beat Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Wisconsin primary and the Hawaii caucuses on Tuesday night, accelerating his momentum ahead of crucial primaries in Ohio and Texas and cutting into Mrs. Clinton’s support among women and union members.

With the two rivals now battling state by state over margins of victory and allotment of delegates, surveys of voters leaving the Wisconsin polls showed Mr. Obama, of Illinois, making new inroads with those two groups as well as middle-age voters and continuing to win support from white men and younger voters — a performance that yielded grim tidings for Mrs. Clinton, of New York.

On the Republican side, Senator John McCain of Arizona won a commanding victory over Mike Huckabee in the Wisconsin contest and led by a wide margin in Washington State. All but assured of his party’s nomination, Mr. McCain immediately went after Mr. Obama during a rally in Ohio, deriding “eloquent but empty” calls for change.

For Mr. Obama, Hawaii was his 10th consecutive victory, a streak in which he has not only run up big margins in many states but also pulled votes from once-stalwart supporters of Mrs. Clinton, like low- and middle-income people and women.

Mrs. Clinton wasted no time in signaling that she would now take a tougher line against Mr. Obama — a recognition, her advisers said, that she must act to alter the course of the campaign and define Mr. Obama on her terms.


My brother Warren visiting Sydney University after being away from Australia for 17 years.