Recently in Up for Debate Category

I got on at West 4th. I know I got on at West 4th. I recall watching out the doorway as passengers got on at Canal, the next stop.

Then I returned my attention to the essay I had been reading.

I did not recall the train ever stopping for very long. I looked up from time to time, people were on the train, everything seemed fine.

I didn't feel the train start moving in the opposite direction.

When, I looked up again, to check the trains progress. My gazed was transfixed on the platform. It looks like Canal St. again. The bird sculptures. Those are the bird sculptures aren't they? I didn't catch the sign. Someone stepped in my way. But I had this feeling the train was going the wrong direction. I couldn't see the sign at the next stop, but I was transfixed by the thought that I'd missed out on an entire period of time. Somewhere. Sometime ago. I had switched trains.

There was no denying it, because I remember so well getting on at West 4th. The train had a C on the end of it? Not an E. Only the E goes backwards so soon in Manhattan.

At the next stop I saw the weird friction worn sculptures. Union Square, I knew. I was on the wrong train.

Confusion and disorientation gave way to relief.

I had gotten on to the wrong train.

Or had I?

Every now and again, I get lost on the trains. Not intentionally mind you. I don't set out to get lost and see the city. Somehow, somewhere, my attention lapses, time dissappears and I'm somewhere I hadn't planned.

Sometimes its refreshing. Today, it was a bit frightening. A simple mistake.

Perhaps the first car did say C. Perhaps my memory isn't as foggy as it seemed just a short while ago.

Just about everyday, I wake up to WNYC's NPR programming. Usually that means that stories like terrorist attacks in Iraq (IEDs-Improvised Explosive Devices), genocide in Uganda, Sudan, etc. and domestic spying by our "elected" administration, plague my dreams. While I know that all around the world, chaos is not raining down on all of us, it sure does feel like it when that alarm goes off the radio clicks on and the reporters start their daily barrage of mostly bad news from around the globe.

Here we are at the beginning of another calendar year and I wake up with all this in my head slowly yet deeply convincing me that perhaps I should just roll back up in the covers and not face the day. I can see why some people tune out the news completely and why many have stopped buying or reading the newpapers. It seems like the world is always falling apart and that no matter what we do, we make it worse. Yet, somewhere within, optimism creeps in and I say to myself, get up time to help stop all this madness.

But where does one start? Often I am reminded that one must choose one's battles wisely. Rarely have I mastered this art, however in the spirit of New Year's resolutions and organizing ones life by setting some goals for the year, I decided that "choose your battles wisely" will become my mantra for this year.

One of the issues we have heard a lot about, particularly over 2005, was climate change. The days last year seem like they could be measured in natural catastrophies. This morning, over my morning coffee (fairly traded and shade grown), I listened to a brief mention that Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison had managed to get support for passing of S. 517 the WEATHER MODIFICATION RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER AUTHORIZATION ACT OF 2005 and it has been placed on the legislative calendar. "Weather Modification, what the hell does that mean?" I thought.

If you see one documentary this year, or in the next five, see this one, The Future of Food. We saw it yesterday and I was humbled and enlivened to see a problem illuminated along with a solution. The documentary has the tone of someone who sat through Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911 and decided that it just was not as an effective way to get dialogue and movement around an issue as it could.

Deborah Koons Garcia, perhaps in response to Michael Moore's lackluster ability to highlight problems of our free-market economy and come off sounding hollow without following through on telling us really what we can do ( besides emailing our senators or protesting someone or something). The Future of Food does a fantastic job of illustrating the problem inherent in Genetically Modified Organisms as a basis for food, that their impacts on the environment haven't been researched enough, are supported and shoved down the world's throat by the one of the largest (monopolistic) agricultural conglomerates on the planet (Monsanto), the negative impacts on the farmer's key ability to harvest and reuse their own seed, and some steps we can and are already taking to reduce and hopefully reverse the impacts and potential impacts of GMOs on our lives and global food chain.

As the air begins to warm up and the leaves emerge from their many month hibernation, so does the sounds and shouts of spring and summer. Just after drifting off to sleep last night I awoke to shots, shouts, screams, and sirens. I looked at the clock and it was around 12:48 am. I must have been asleep all of two minutes, so it scared me even more than it normally would. It was like a falling dream where you wake up before you hit the ground, but this time the scary part was the awake time.

We live on a block in between Fulton St. and Atlantic Ave. nearly atop the Franklin Ave. C subway station. Our bedroom wall and backyard is on the Fulton side of the block, so as summer nears so do the sounds and chaos of Fulton/Franklin and Fulton/Classon corners. The distance between Classon and Franklin is like a 1/2 city block. Both corners look out onto a calamity of transients, unemployed, and generally unhappy people throughout the days and nights. The Franklin Ave. subway stop, according to a guy I overheard coming up the south exit stairs one day is "...the stinkiest mother f*%#!@$ subway stop in all of New York City!"

This article on openDemocracy.net, hits a lot of nails on the head towards furthering our great need to seal off and bury our coffin of un-manicured and ineffective dissent, debate, and criticism of the past four years and year of presidential campaigns.

I think we all could learn a lot from the nuggets of truth in this essay. While I've been very critical of the current administration's policies and response to the attacks of 9/11, I've also been very dissatisfied with the innate hypocrisy in anti-American sentiment.

How does one justify lashing out at American values and ideals when one has the freedom to do exactly that?

We should dissent and we should pay attention to what OUR government and elected officials are doing. When we disagree we should ask our government to stop doing whatever it is doing, or is not doing; however, we cannot be against the ideals of America for it strikes me that it is those very ideals that allow us to stand against our ideals. American ideals and America is not one frame of mind or understanding, they and it is ever-evolving. Malleability lies at the very nature of the greatness of our pursuit.

Anyways, this essay, if not my foggy regurgitation, is very thought provoking and I hope you'll humor me and read it through. I'd love to hear your feedback.

Let's see anyone need some paper or maybe a new road? It's just a few trees. No one will even notice.

Administration Overhauls Rules for U.S. Forests

Oh but wait...he says he is "Protecting the Environment".

“Our duty is to use the land well, and sometimes, not to use it at all. This is our responsibility as citizens; but, more than that, it is our calling as stewards of the Earth,” said the President. “Good stewardship of the environment is not just a personal responsibility, it is a public value. Americans are united in the belief that we must preserve our natural heritage and safeguard the land around us.”

Um...yea, right.

After watching all four of the debates (available over at C-SPAN if you haven't seen them) for this year's presidential election, presented by the Commision on Presidential Debates (Please watch this video on the how the debates are coordinated from Bill Moyers program, NOW: VIDEO.), I still felt I had little perspective on what kind of leaders they'll make for the next four years. Besides the facts I already have gleaned about both of them from their past years of service (which you can read about over at vote smart or the whitehouse.gov, if you are interested John Kerry or George Bush) and the press coverage of the past few years.

9/11/2001

A little after 9am, I received an instant message from Tracie. "Uh...we're listening to the radio and they say that a plane crashed into the world trade center..."

A little while later...

"um...oh my god!...another plane crashed into the world trade center..."

It is confession time for me. It is time that I come clean with everyone out there. I don’t exceed the speed limit. There, I have said it. When I drive, I keep it right at the speed limit. Not a couple of miles per hour over it, but right at it, and it seems to drive people insane. I personally don’t get it. Obeying the speed limit is the only time that I can think of (though I am sure there are others) where most people in genneral will call you obscene things, and consider you to be an all around @&#*!%^@ for not breaking the law.

I don’t know how much longer I can take it. The whole thing has become ridiculous. For the past few years I have denied the allegations that George Walker Bush and his ilk were doing anything shady and underhanded. I figured they were just stupid. I tend to ignore conspiracy theories as a general concept, as they are usually simply the products of overactive imaginations, and paranoia. Still, I have to say that I really cannot ignore the simple facts of the situation any longer.