Birthday Card to Chris, too late to mail!

I was telling Kali that I joined your family when you were about 6, and from that time on I have loved you most specially.  You have never ceased to amaze, impress and inspire me.  You were given an amazing mind and nature and you could have applied it in oh so many ways.  You applied it in the service of others, to meet a greater social, human and ethical good.  I recall when you wanted to become a medical ethicist.  Isn’t it interesting how the fortunes of life place us precisely where we should be.  Your work with the AIDS community, is the epitome of medical ethics – in support of those with little, no, or an unappreciated often misunderstood voice, the sometimes invisible populations (even extending to their support communities, the even more invisible private world of their pets and those whom they love).

You are adored by those who know you and you help and serve even those who do not know you.  Your brief 40 years on this planet have been productive and powerful, I can’t wait to watch you continue your personal growth as one of the most whole and self-realized people I have the honor to know.

I am a believer in personal choices and paths, charting and pursuing a course, balanced within the realities we have, each of us, set upon us.  You have chosen a path of partner to the planet and to the people who inhabit it.  You could not make me more proud to know and love you.  Thank you for allowing space for me to participate in your life.

Happy Birthday, go in Peace!

AIDS Project New Haven

Pillaging the Villagers – The self-fulfilling prophecy of burning books

Burning books – even religious ones – is an act of defiance, aggression, and passion that sits on the precipice of reason and opens the door to the specter of violence. Is this really a protected form of “speech”? Doesn’t this look more like 21st century meets 14th century version of marauders raping and pillaging to humiliate the village and emotionally debilitate the surviving male (warriors) – but there is a probable subtext (causal action and reaction)– no matter how covert – which is for the purpose of drawing out an impassioned, and predictable response of violence that will beget an ‘I told you so.’ And thus propagate further violence.

This is called ‘self fulfilling prophecy’. Aren’t we, all of us are now being manipulated by an extremist fringe view, just the kind of view we say we detest and remain in war over. And we shall live and raise our children in the increasingly unstable aftermath.

If you came and burned my religious books, I can guarantee that my first reaction would not be one of tranquil discourse on your deeply considered reasons why.

WWYD, if someone was burning the book that belongs to you?