Final So Much to Think About for 2023.
Many football fans punch, shoot, run over, or otherwise destroy their TV when things don’t go well for their team.
Contrast
Rick Reilly put Mike McDaniel, the sunny head coach of the Miami Dolphins, and Bill Belichick, the gloomy head coach of the New England Patriots, side by side: “One is as open as a new Safeway, and the other is as closed up as an old submarine. One will tell you anything you want; the other will hand out information on a need-to-go-screw-yourself basis. One looks like a nerd who got lost on a stadium tour and wound up as head coach. The other looks like an Easter Island statue nursing a grudge.”
Death shadow
The most beautiful times of day are dawn and dusk when shadows are long, offering contrast, refuge and form. Death is the shadow that gives shape to existence, urgency to love, brilliance to life. Limitless life is tedium without resolution.
Roger Cohen
Humility
“…we must—absolutely must—maintain a fundamental humility before the Great Mystery. If we do not, religion always worships itself and its formulations and never God.”
Richard Rohr – The Divine Dance
Good news
Good news: crime rates are going down, no matter what many of us actually think or believe:
Crime in the United States has declined significantly over the last year, according to new FBI data that contradicts a widespread national perception that law-breaking and violence are on the rise.
A Gallup poll released this month found that 77% of Americans believe crime rates are worsening, but they are mistaken, the new FBI data and other statistics show.
The FBI data, which compares crime rates in the third quarter of 2023 to the same period last year, found that violent crime dropped 8%, while property crime fell 6.3% to what would be its lowest level since 1961, according to criminologist Jeff Asher, who analyzed the FBI numbers.
Murder plummeted in the United States in 2023 at one of the fastest rates of decline ever recorded, Asher found, and every category of major crime except auto theft declined.
Yet 92% of Republicans, 78% of independents and 58% of Democrats believe crime is rising, the Gallup survey shows.
“I think we’ve been conditioned, and we have no way of countering the idea” that crime is rising,” Asher said. “It’s just an overwhelming number of news media stories and viral videos — I have to believe that social media is playing a role.”
The FBI’s quarterly numbers cover about 78% of the U.S. population and don’t give as full a picture as the more comprehensive annual report the FBI puts out once a year. But Asher said the quarterly reports in the past have hewed fairly close to the annual ones.
The most recent annual report, released in October, covered 94% of the country and found that violent crime in 2022 fell back to pre-pandemic levels, with murder dropping 6.1%.
Asher maintains a separate database of murder in big cities which found that murder is down 12.7 percent this year, after rising during the pandemic.
Detroit is on pace to have the fewest murders since 1966, Asher found, while Baltimore and St Louis are on track to post the fewest murders in each city in nearly a decade. A few cities, including Memphis and Washington DC, are still seeing increases in their murder rates, but they are outliers.
Scot McKnight
Covering up
the story of the old Oxford don who, whenever the paper on his desk got quite out of control, would simply spread a copy of the Times over the lot and start again. After his death they found several layers, like an archaeologist’s tell, of matters that had never been dealt with.
N T wright Surprised by Hope
Hospitality
Humility is more important than zeal. Descent into nothingness and dependence on God. Otherwise I am just fighting the world with its own weapons and there the world is unbeatable. Indeed it does not even have to fight back, for I will exhaust myself and that will be the end of my stupid efforts.
Thomas Merton
Doing what we can|
Anne Lamott
Recently I was walking along the cliffs above the Pacific with one of these old friends, named Neshama. We go back 50 years. She is 84, short and sturdy with fuzzy hair like mine. Every so often, she bent down somewhat tentatively and picked up small items that she’d then tuck into a small cloth pouch that dangled from her belt.
“I’m picking up micro litter, bottle caps and bits of wrappers. I try to help where I can.”
I reminded her of an old story along these lines, of a sparrow and a horse. A great warhorse comes upon a tiny sparrow lying on its back with its feet in the air, eyes squinched tightly shut with effort. The horse asks it what it’s doing.
“I’m trying to help hold back the darkness.”
The horse roars with laughter. “That is so pathetic. What do you weigh, about an ounce?”
And the sparrow replies, “One does what one can.”
This is what older age means; we do what we can. We pick up smaller things and move more tentatively. We’ve unwillingly become characters from the movie “Cocoon.”
Feeling
…last month, Americans felt worse about the economy than they did in April 2009. The key word is feel, because by any standard remotely tied to this planet, it is delusional to think that things are worse today than during the meltdown of the Great Recession. As James Surowiecki (a contributing writer for The Atlantic) dryly observed on X about the comparison to 2009, “It’s true that if you ignore the 9% unemployment rate, the financial system melting down, the millions of people being foreclosed on and losing their homes, and the plummeting stock market decimating people’s retirements, it was better. But why would you do that?”
…few people are spending less, no matter how much they carp about inflation; in surveys, she notes, “people say that they are trading down because of cost pressures. But in fact they are spending more than they ever have, even after accounting for higher prices. They’re spending not just on the necessities, but on fun stuff—amusement parks, UberEats.”
Abraham Lincoln implored citizens in 1838 to rely on “cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason.” But if Americans are now stuck in the mode where nothing but vibes and feelings matter, much more is at risk than one or two elections. No democracy can long survive an electorate whose only guidance is emotion.
The Atlantic
Vulnerability
Dr. Brene Brown defines vulnerability as showing up to your life without any guarantees.
Vulnerability is being rigorously honest with those around you, through your actions and your words, about who you are and what you need. Vulnerability is the willingness to be seen for who we are, not who we want to be.
God became vulnerable in Jesus so that when you face the inevitability of vulnerability in your own life you can know beyond a shadow of a doubt that God meets you there, in that precise place.
Kelly Edmiston
Short Wedding Quotes
“Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.” —Aristotle
“We loved with a love that was more than love.” —Edgar Allan Poe
“If I know what love is, it is because of you.”—Hermann Hesse
“If you are with the right person, it brings out the best version of you.” —Beyoncé Knowles
“To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides.” —David Viscott
“Marriages are made in heaven. But so again are thunder and lightning.” —Clint Eastwood
“Two hearts in love need no words.” —Marceline Desbordes-Valmore
“You are the butter to my bread, and the breath to my life.” —Julia Child
“Remember tonight, for it is the beginning of always.” —Dante Alighieri
“Some people care too much. I think it’s called love.” —Winnie the Pooh
“The best thing to hold onto in life is each other.” —Audrey Hepburn
Wanted – Nanny/ Manny
the “personal and household services” ads on Monster.com. At the time of this writing, the section for my town of Brookline, Massachusetts, featured one placed by a “busy professional couple” seeking a “Part Time Nanny.” The nanny (or manny—the ad scrupulously avoids committing to gender) is to be “bright, loving, and energetic”; “friendly, intelligent, and professional”; and “a very good communicator, both written and verbal.” She (on balance of probability) will “assist with the care and development” of two children and will be “responsible for all aspects of the children’s needs,” including bathing, dressing, feeding, and taking the young things to and from school and activities. That’s why a “college degree in early childhood education” is “a plus.”
In short, Nanny is to have every attribute one would want in a terrific, professional, college-educated parent. Except, of course, the part about being an actual professional, college-educated parent. There is no chance that Nanny will trade places with our busy 5G couple. She “must know the proper etiquette in a professionally run household” and be prepared to “accommodate changing circumstances.” She is required to have “5+ years experience as a Nanny,” which makes it unlikely that she’ll have had time to get the law degree that would put her on the other side of the bargain. All of Nanny’s skills, education, experience, and professionalism will land her a job that is “Part Time.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130/
What better way to conclude So Much to Think About for 2023 than:
More Good news
Just about the worst calamity that can befall a human is to lose a child, and historically, almost half of children worldwide died before they reached the age of 15. That share has declined steadily since the 19th century, and the United Nations Population Division projects that in 2023 a record low was reached in global child mortality, with just 3.6 percent of newborns dying by the age of 15.
That’s the lowest such figure in human history. It still means that about 4.9 million children died this year — but that’s a million fewer than died as recently as 2016.
STILL ON THE JOURNEY