I went to college when Promise Keepers (PK) was huge.  During my sophomore year of college PK had a huge rally on the National Mall in  Washington D.C. on a Saturday in October.  On that particular Saturday I was scheduled to play pep-band for the homecoming soccer game. I begged the director of the band, who was also an active participant in PK, to let me go.  He eventually let me go, but he wasn’t happy about it.  The reason it was so important for me to go was because it was hyped up as an event that would make history.

In the end it was a big event, but not necessarily historical – in the sense that it would be written about in history books. There have been several events like this one where I felt the need to be part of them because they would ‘make history’. Thankfully, I’m older and wiser now and the lure of making history doesn’t motivate my participation in events any longer.

As I have been listening to the back and forth banter regarding the healthcare legislation that is trying to move through Congress, I can’t help but be reminded of my former motivation.  If you listen to Ms. Pelosi speak on the topic, nearly every time she’ll mention that they’re going to make history with this bill – in fact nearly everybody that favors the bill will mention it. While it’s true that this bill will make history, not passing the bill would also be a historical event. In fact they could do they hokey-pokey and it would be historical.

The problem with this motivation is that it causes people to skirt their responsibility in favor of delusions of grander.  Just like I skipped out on my responsibilities in pep-band to be part of something that ended up being big deal for the 2 days following. The Congress by pushing, what pretty much everybody accepts as, a bad bill in order to make history is also skipping out on their responsibilities.  Responsible healthcare reform is a great idea, but the way they’re going after it in order to make history has dropped the responsible from the equation.

If they were going after healthcare reform to actually make things better rather than as a way of showing they’ve made history, then they’d be willing to slow down and focus on what is being done.  Back room deals and strange procedural hacks are not the sign of someone trying to be responsible, they’re the sign of someone desperate to make something happen no matter the consequences.  They need to drop the goal of making history and focus on making changes that everybody accepts will help.

Earlier this week Glenn Beck made waves by urging Christians to leave any church that supports social justice.  Promptly after he made these statements, prominent Christians all over the country reacted negatively and started to urge their followers to boycott Beck.  While I understand the reaction, I’m wondering if it was the correct one.  After all, this wouldn’t be the first time Christians made a knee jerk reaction and made the wrong move. Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday we headed out to Yellowstone National Park. We went up to the west entrance from our place in Victor. Along the way we stopped at Mesa Falls, which is a beautiful set of waterfalls a little south and west of Yellowstone. There are a couple of walkways that lead you down to a safe viewing area to see the waterfalls. Along this trip we saw a lot of waterfalls, which seems to be characteristic of this part of the country with the large rises and falls in elevation. Yellowstone itself has many waterfalls, of which we stopped to see three. The most beautiful of the stops that we made was Painters Point, which gives a great view of the lower falls of the Yellowstone River. It made for some beautiful photographs.

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On day two of our journey we traveled to Pingree, Idaho. Pingree is a small farming community – there are more cattle than people in the town. Wide open spaces abound, much of which are covered with potato plants. Yes, this is the part of Idaho where the world famous Idaho Russet Potato comes from and boy oh boy do they have a lot of them. Fields as long and far as you can see just covered with potato plants. Pingree is small enough that the streets are named after the people that reside on the street – since there is basically one house per street – so since Jen’s relatives last name is Rossi they live on Rossi Road. There is a gas station/general store and a restaurant/pub and that is the total of the commerce for the town.

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It’s odd how vacations, which are supposed to be these terribly relaxing times, always start with a mad rush to get out of the house.  From what I understand, once you have kids that rush never ends, but alas I don’t have kids yet.  We left last night to go on our summer vacation and that rush was in full effect.

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