Wordcandy

I read my old hometown where I grew up, newspaper fairly frequently, sometimes once a week. For the most part, this gives me all of the local news in ten to fifteen minutes after a quick skim of the local section. Generally I read it online, scrounging through the front page, digging in the sports section, and checking out the news stories from the past week or so. I don’t think of it as anything more than checking out what is happening in half of my family’s neighborhood, but there is a bit of remembrance tucked in, too.

Every once in a while something hits home and I have to go the OMG route, shake my head and think how nice it is to live a step or two above total Redneckrocity, albeit still in the stained farming implement baseball cap country.

Today was one of those days. I found a January 5, 2010, article by Clare Kennedy in the Owatonna People’s Press (OPP) (Yah, you know me) entitled “Parry’s tweets cause uproar.” The article discussed a state senate candidates both informative and questionable tweets. Rather than detail them, I’ll give you the link: http://www.owatonna.com/news.php?viewStory=113256

While he defends himself like a good politician should, and did what all of us on occasion do by erasing the offending tweets when we are struck by the stupidity of the moment, the words sorry never appears in the article. To me, this is unfortunate. Even saying that he understands how it could be offensive but that it was not his intention to offend would be a step in a more friendly direction. But, alas, not even that. Nope, what the article reveals is just his defense of his own opinions, that he frequently has this and other beliefs and that being something like a real man, a man who is capable of using his first amendment rights, is akin to apple pie America.

I’ve had the incredible failure of tweeting a regretful thing once or twice. Most of it was last summer in a period of angst that I blame mostly on my missing wife (she was externing) and the hardship of single parenthood. In other instances, because typos are quite often a part of every other tweet I send, which I blame on the small keyboard on my phone and my huge thumbs, my mispoken words are the faux pas of proofreading.

In passing I would just like to mention that spelling is not my strong suit, even when I finished 2nd during a 1st grade spelling bee (actually I won, but I had spelled “Pig” “Peg” and the teacher gave me the word again thinking I had misheard her; so I spelled the word a different way, the correct way, the second time) (that I can remember that of all the things that happened in 1st grade should be fact enough to prove me right, Ms. Levin).

While of a much different category, these two points remind me of another.  Stephen Fry made a comment he regretted and for which he later apologized. In a way it created a new word – tweet-rage – as the community both for and against him voiced their opinions, got into an ever-increasing shouting match, until Fry himself urged peace. In fact, he almost quit tweeting because of it.

He recognized at the time, and further discussed his thoughts on, the strengths and problems with our modern culture, and tweeting in particular, and how angry and disconnected we’ve all become. I can not say that he specifically believes the following point, but I do think that he feels modernity can get in the way of human contact and real living at times. To prove this point, he has even taken a sabbatical while he finishes his latest book (and his tweets of the recent cricket in South Africa were sorely missed).

For me, and what all of these points suggest, a modern culture where we all freely share our opinions requires reactions like a sports hero’s at a news conference.  Even if spurred by a misguided reporter’s question, opinions lead to bulletin board responses.  One either takes the line that the fodder you’ve supplied your opponent won’t affect the game, or you try to downplay what you said with apologizes and community service. When some of the more poorly worded or offensive phrases show up, we have to follow our instinct and choose which option we feel most reflects our image.

Far be it for me to say Mr. Fry’s or Mr. Parry’s reaction is the better way; for each of them, they dealt with their own words as they deemed proper, and their response reflects more about each of them than their original, poorly chosen words. While I know how I would react, waving a flag to say my way is the better of the two seems like a political statement, and that I’ll leave up to the January 26 voters in District 26.

When I was in ninth grade, I did perhaps my most courageous and memorable thing: I gave the sermon at an Easter Sunrise Service for two hundred other, barely awake members of the Methodist church I belonged.

I did it, I think, because I was starved for attention at the time, and I have always had something to say whether or not I knew what I was talking about. Although it might have suited me, I really had no ambition to be a preacher; I knew of very few of them I felt were well grounded in society. This is to say, most of them seem unattached to the things in the world I liked, because even at fourteen, I had a grasp of what it meant to be an adult. At that time, too, I had an innate, hardcore belief that I subscribed to Christianity for two main reasons: I had been born into a Midwestern, American family instead of one from another country and another belief system, and I was born into my family where strict adherence to family rules was required, one of which was regular church attendance.

The sermon was on the scientific, factual veracity of the Bible, a subject I thought apropos for that service as Easter often brought large numbers of the people who answered “Once or Twice a Year” to the question three of the church’s membership feeler. I used Noah’s flood story and the Dead Sea Scrolls to talk about how we can believe because there are facts for our belief.

Now I often think of that sermon, and the path I took to be the person who I am, and I wonder if this sermon was meant to convince myself. I am regularly filled with doubt when it comes to my personal life, and religion is often an aspect of this questioning. Most days it is a nagging feeling that could be akin to lack of confidence, something I surely did not lack on that day twenty-five years ago in April.

But for these reasons in themselves, I should be drawn to God, a God, or gods. This is because I often believe that, in order to have faith, one must have doubt. If you truly, whole-heartedly accepted something and had no doubt in it, there would be no reason for faith; you would simple believe because there was nothing that could challenge it, and its acceptance would not challenge free will or require giving into doubt. To me, these things one does not know but are willing to put trust in are the very backbone of religion.
Today, for reasons so numerous that I can’t fill in this weblog and will take hundreds of weblogs to explain, I can not put my trust in many things. My wife, of course, and my family are a few of these. But more often my faith is centered in other things, and most of it is centered on sports. After all, my faith that my sports team will win is often filled with doubt, and yet to believe in them and their future is often as questionable as believing in a supreme deity – I am, after all, a Twins-Vikings-Gophers-Tottenham Hotspur fan, and only my faith in the Bison has a resemblance of God fulfilling my prayers.

But this doubt is raised I think for me from a deeper feeling – that it is not possible to be one hundred percent certain about anything. This I am of such a full acceptance that I still on occasion entertain the idea that there is nothing else out there and that I am alone, dreaming, and nothing else exists. I may do this only because it offers me moments of sanity, although a psychologist may cite delusion, feel working three jobs, lack of sleep, and having a social life akin to a moose vacationing in a desert.

To an extent, I think, these weblogs are a way to still touch that childhood need to voice my opinion and opine to the larger community about my doubts. In a way they are one of the few things that I try to know what I am talking about. Several weblog ideas I have discarded because I don’t know enough about them, although they still fascinate me as thought experiments, the latest being whether Einstein was right when I wrote about space-time. I would have loved to question it, but I can’t fully grasp the math.

I remember several congratulations the days after I finished my sermon. Even the pastor I most admired had words of encouragement, and today I still have the strongest twinge of joy and acceptance when I’ve written something I think is very good. Whether or not I could have been a preacher and survived on these moments, however, is quite often another thought experiment, and one that only my doubt has the strength enough to foster.