Being ill prepared usually brings about it ill consequence, depending on what is being done — sometimes disastrous, even. There are not too many examples I have seen of people being fined by the police for being poorly prepared for something, however — until I came across an example of exactly this. A gentleman in Victoria made plans to go on a three day hike and only took the most paltry of provisions — potatoes and naan, to be exact.
I’m not sure if there’s much more left to to say in the wake of the Sandy Hook killings in Connecticut that hasn’t already been shot to death before — except that it was excellent how, together, teachers and students faced down death that day — while our politicians will never be similarly brave because they are more terrified of the long and ugly shadow of the NRA than they are of dead children.
Continue reading → The Dead and the Scared: How Sandy Hook Stood Up to a Gunman
Today is the third day in a row I’m writing about the death of the great author and teacher, Dr. Howard Stein, because I just can’t get his life out of my mind. Every time we’d meet or speak on the phone, I would take copious notes because I didn’t want to forget anything he told me.
Every conversation was ripe and ready for memorialization in a blog post or in a future thinking endeavor. Howard Stein was always teaching, and when you had his attention, you were the most important person in the world to him. He was staunchly rational and fearless almost up to the end; and I say “almost” because during the last few months of his life, he confessed to me that, at night, he would get scared.
As we continue to mourn the death of Dr. Howard Stein, we are left to ponder the joy of knowing him and, in missing him, we begin the healing process by remembering the important lessons he taught us.
One of the most poignant conversations I had with him in the last few weeks of his life dealt with age and growing older. Howard reversed an important expectation for me, and I appreciate the reality of that sobering.
We have been taught since childhood that self-harm and suicide are inappropriate and never the solution to any problem. Yet, every year, many of us still decide to end our lives by our own hand.
Why?
Do we kill ourselves because of a lack of coping skills? Do we raise our hand against our minds because we feel helpless and lost? Does turning on the “Off Button” somehow lead to the easing of an inexpressible pain?
Continue reading → When Suicide is Not Enough: Killing by Economic Deficit
Twitter has done a lot of things in the last six years since it launched from giving everyone the ability to tweet about their daily tinkle routines to social revolution, but the one thing that it seems to prove is that people do not seem to ever learn that if you put something out on Twitter it is not that different from yelling it from a rooftop.
For one, a good number of people have been outright fired or otherwise lost their jobs because of posts they have made on Twitter. I would never imagine anybody other than someone who didn’t care about their employment status going onto a rooftop to announce to the world that they were going to get a job that they hated but would get a big paycheck for it.
The year was 1987, and I was sitting in the cafeteria of a hospital in Princeton having a snack while waiting for my mother to come down and tell me if there had been any update with the family member I had been visiting. Hospitals seemed to be a dark and gloomy place for me and I had a companion with me that brought me a bit of cheer in the form of a Walkman and a copy of the 1986 album Licensed to Ill on cassette. I loved looking at the cover of the tape and thinking about the circumstances that would cause a plane to crumple like that. I must have listened to that album half a dozen times when I was sitting in that hospital. Now I am sad to have learned that one of the founding members of The Beastie Boys, Adam Yauch (known as MCA), passed away on Friday at the age of 47, possibly related to the cancer he was treating since 2009.
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