From the category archives:

Life

Another Coming of Age

March 8, 2010 · 2 comments

On March 8, 1994 — that’s sixteen years ago today — Trent Reznor unleashed The Downward Spiral, which would help me define and focus on so much of the unbridled emotions I dealt with as I stumbled through high school and found my way through college.

When I came around to this album in the fall of 1996, it forced a painful, unignorable light onto some of the things I had been ignoring until that point. My mother had disowned me four years earlier, shortly after the death of my father, and I had been living with my paternal grandparents since then. I had a good life, and was given anything I could’ve ever needed, but I was still very, very angry at my mother for what she had done and what she had become.

Even at the young age of fourteen, I found the voice of my anger in the opening lines of “Mr. Self Destruct” (I am the voice in side your head, and I control you.), my mantra in “Piggy” (Nothing can stop me now.), a painful realization of what my mother had become in “Heresy” ([She] flexed [her] muscles to keep [her] flock of sheep in line.), and quiet solace in the instrumental hauntings of “A Warm Place”.

I got a lot out of this album, and it guided me through a lot of dark places. Years later, I’d find out that I had gotten out of it exactly what Trent tried to put into it, albeit in quite a different context:

Thematically, I wanted to explore the idea of somebody who systematically throws or uncovers every layer of what he’s surrounded with, comfort-wise, from personal relationships to religion to questioning the whole situation.

Over the years, I’d find new meanings in old songs, but they were always more cathartic and productive than hateful or destructive. For me, this ride was most certainly on a spiral, but it wasn’t downward. It would take me nearly a decade to fully realize what this album had put into motion (culminating, perhaps, in the title track of Tool’s Lateralus), but it gave me the focus and the resolve to cut toxic relationships from my life.

There are days when this album is difficult to listen to, because it captures a snapshot of where I was, but it also serves to remind me of how far I’ve come. This album was the first piece of a map out of the dark place that my relationship with my mother had become. Over the last several years, though, this album has become an old friend. It’s one of those albums that just feel like home to me. It helps keep me focused when I’m distracted, find balance when I’m off-kilter, and find a quiet calmness when things seem to be hopelessly upended.

So, sixteen years after it was first unleashed, I will spend part of tonight with my DVD-Audio re-release of The Downward Spiral, my favorite pair of headphones, and a realization of just how far I’ve come.

Nothing can stop me now.

Our Pale Blue Dot

March 4, 2010 · 0 comments

On September 6, 1977, NASA launched its Voyager 1 spacecraft.  In 1990, after passing the orbits of Pluto and Neptune, NASA used their on-board cameras to look back toward Earth and snap a photograph.

This is what they received:

The bands of light seen here are due to sunlight being scattered by the camera’s optics, but look closely at the right-most band of light.  See that tiny blue dot?

That’s us.

Carl Sagan:

Look again at that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

On March 27th, 2010, at 8:30 PM CDT, I’ll be participating in Earth Hour 2010.  My wife and I will invite a few friends over, turn off the non-essential electronics in our home, light a few candles, and probably play a game or two of Catan.  What will you do?

For a glimpse at some of the world’s most famous landmarks “going dark” during last year’s event, check out this collection of photographs from The Big Picture.

The goal of this event is to raise awareness for our role is perceived as man-made global warming, but it’s also an excuse to have some close friends over for an evening of fellowship.

After 100 years, are the Boy Scouts of America still relevant?

February 8, 2010

The Boy Scouts of America was officially founded on February 8, 1910. A century later, it has seen more than a hundred million members join its ranks and has awarded the rank of Eagle Scout to nearly two million young men.

I am an Eagle Scout.  My father didn’t earn his Eagle, but his father and three brothers did.  Three of my cousins are Eagle Scouts.  My wife’s father, brother, and great uncle are all Eagle Scouts.  Suffice it to say that I am enthusiastically supportive of the program, even if I sometimes find myself at odds with the policies and decisions of the national committee.

I make no qualms about my opposition to the discriminatory policies held by the BSA against atheists and homosexuals.  However, I have long held the belief that, ultimately, the positions and the policies of the national committee affect the organization on a macro level.  The problems seen on that scale are quite marginalized on a micro scale (ie. individual councils or units).

Instead, I participate in Scouting — despite my opposition to specific policies — because I still feel that the program is important and that it makes a difference.  I had been drafting an essay for this site, largely touching on this topic, and whether Scouting was relevant in today’s society, but GeekDad beat me to it.

This morning, in a similarly-titled essay, Dave Banks hit the nail on the head:

At the 2000 Democratic National Convention, hundreds of delegates booed a group of Boy Scouts as they led the convention in the Pledge of Allegiance. While this show of disapproval must have been heart-felt, it was misguided. The frustration that some have with the Boy Scouts is understandable, but a group of 14 and 16 year old boys doesn’t dictate organizational policy. The argument the delegates had was with the BSA administration.

This is the heart of the argument about Scouting’s relevancy. While the Scouting program provides plenty of opportunity to boys to develop important and unique skills, hone leadership traits that will pay off outside scouting and help boys to live up to their potential, most of the complaints people lodge against Scouting’s relevancy are tied to decisions that the BSA’s adult leadership makes. And so we’re faced with a decision: should we withhold the potentially outstanding experience of Boy Scouts from our sons because of the unbending rules of the organization’s administration?

To make matters more complicated, on the local level, there is often a flexible interpretation of the laws. Homosexual parents and scouts serve Boy Scouts without fear of reprisal (even in America’s Bible belt), and atheists simply keep their mouths shut during the scout pledge to God and claims of reverence. Like many issues, at the local level, we’re all just people and local administration understands that. At its core, Scouting is a program they believe in and want to share with others, no matter who they are or what they believe. And ultimately, the biggest knocks to Scouting’s relevancy don’t make much sense. As a parent, I wouldn’t expect a heterosexual Catholic leader to proselytize to my son about his religion or his sexuality, any more than I’d think a homosexual atheist would be discussing those subjects with my kids.

This is quite representative of what I personally see in most criticisms of Scouting.  The topics of atheists and homosexuals in Scouting have served as a lightning rod, but I think that they get a largely disproportionate amount of attention from the media and the public.

These critics generally don’t loathe that we raise young men and women to be thoughtful, meticulous leaders.  They don’t sneer at the millions of hours of community service rendered each year by local units.  They don’t complain when we donate warm clothes to homeless shelters, serve dinner at a community kitchen, or team up with Habitat for Humanity to literally put a roof over someone’s head.

Ultimately, however, the collection of those experiences are what define Scouting, they’re what define a Scout’s experience, and they’re what make Scouting great.

I wouldn’t trade my knowledge or experiences from Scouting for anything.  These experiences have given me a way to relate to my father (who died when I was only 7), helped me learn to communicate with my grandfather (who was a very stubborn old man), taught me things that I probably would not have learned on my own, and has shown me things — in nature and in myself — that I could’ve never dreamed of finding on my own.

When the day comes, I hope that I have a son with whom to share a similar experience.  I don’t think that a better case for relevancy can be made.

To make matters more complicated, on the local level, there is often a flexible interpretation of the laws. Homosexual parents and scouts serve Boy Scouts without fear of reprisal (even in America’s Bible belt), and atheists simply keep their mouths shut during the scout pledge to God and claims of reverence. Like many issues, at the local level, we’re all just people and local administration understands that. At its core, Scouting is a program they believe in and want to share with others, no matter who they are or what they believe. And ultimately, the biggest knocks to Scouting’s relevancy don’t make much sense. As a parent, I wouldn’t expect a heterosexual Catholic leader to proselytize to my son about his religion or his sexuality, any more than I’d think a homosexual atheist would be discussing those subjects with my kids.