What is a "Family Newspaper"?

I dropped in to read something off The Bulletin website today and noted their banner states they are "Philadelphia's Family Newspaper".

I don't know what that means. How is it a "Family Newspaper"?

Does it mean all of their content has a "G" rating or an "E for Everyone" label?

Does it mean they don't report on shootings, homicides, arrests, rapes, or any other crime element in the city?

Or is it more similar to "Family Style Restaurants" where the expectation is everyone will sit down at a table together and the various sections portioned out like the mashed potatoes?

My guess is that "Family Newspaper" refers to the conservative leanings of their editorials and I'm only basing that guess on the notion that "family values" is a tag line synonymous with conservative politics. I'm also guessing the whole point of publishing The Bulletin with its conservatively colored prose is to act as a rebuttal against the "liberal" Inquirer and the "liberal" media in general.

I could be completely wrong and I could live with being wrong about it, but I can't think of any other reason to add "family" before "newspaper". The answer to a press that leans too far in one political direction is not to publish a second paper equally leaning in the opposite direction.

The answer would be to publish a genuinely unbiased accounting of news and events. I don't need all kinds of inflammatory interpretation from either side. All I want is to know what's going on outside the walls of my house and little work cubicle. I can figure out how I feel or what I think about it on my own time.

It's a newspaper - the news on paper with news defined as the factual recounting of events that might affect me and mine and their future, and paper defined as the medium for delivering the news, be it a tangible printed piece or an electronic vision online.

Unfortunately, it's a distractingly silly phrase. I almost didn't bother reading any of it because I couldn't get past the notion that a conscious decision was made to describe "newspaper" with "family".

Stranger Talk

This isn't so much a random street scene as it is one of those random moments of surreal interactions with a stranger.

The elderly man sitting next to me on the train started complaining as soon as we left 30th St station about traveling over the Thanksgiving holiday and how he was staying home.

This led him to the topic of terrorism, where he claimed (loudly) that "No one is going to get ME to hit a prayer rug 5 times a day! I don't even go to church once a week. I go to the church of 'CBS Sunday Edition'. You're not going to get me to bang my head on the floor 5 times a day! It's no wonder they're all nuts! Stop banging your head on the floor!"

Before he could get completely wound up, I pointed out that extremists in any religion are dangerous - look at the fundamentalist Christians.

He replied (loudly), "But they're not burning people at the stake or crucifying people! Haven't done anything like that for over 500 years!!"

He kept this rant up for a little bit. I was trying very hard not to stir him up even more, so I wasn't giving him much ammunition and limiting myself to some head nods and no eye contact.

He was quiet for a while. Then he said, "You want to hear an example of political correctness gone too far?"

"You only have one?"

"I called my bank this morning. Wachovia. And you know what their recorded message said?! 'We'll be closed for the federal holiday.' Can you believe it?! They can't say we'll be closed for Thanksgiving! They have to say "federal" holiday?! Now it's wrong to say Happy Thanksgiving?!??! Who's going to be offended by that - a bunch of turkeys?!!!"

I paused as I debated should I/shouldn't I and finally decided I could not let this go.

I turned to him and said, "Well, I don't know think it's an example of political correctness gone wrong so much as it's an example of a cheap bank. A lot of places have recordings like that so they don't have to keep re-recording the message each holiday. It doesn't matter if it's President's Day or Veteran's Day or Thanksgiving. They can run the same tape saying they'll be closed for the federal holiday, whichever holiday it might be."

His face was priceless. He started out with a quizzical look that quickly dissolved into astonishment and after a moment of digesting this possibility, he said, "Oh. I never thought of that. So you mean that angry e-mail I sent to Wachovia's CEO this morning....."

I nodded at him. Yes, sir. They will have noooooo idea what you were so upset about.

I thought this was a good place to end the conversation except he then said, "Well, I called Glenn Beck about it this morning. Do you ever listen to Glenn Beck?"

"No. I know who he is, but I don't listen to him."

"I called him this morning and told them this story and they put me on the air! And Glenn said he would let the last line - the part about turkeys being offended - speak for itself. And you know they have that delay, so with the delay, I got hear myself on the radio!"

With this he sat up a little straighter in his seat, beamed at me very proudly and said in a half-joking manner, "Now I'm a radio star."

I could analyze this incident all day. I can't make presumptions about the man's life. I'm not going to assume that because he's elderly, that must mean he's lonely. Now that my mother is hitting her mid-70's, I'm very sensitive about making snap judgments about the elderly. My mother is not lonely, not feeble, not disoriented, or suffering from any of the other problems senior citizens are often saddled with by younger generations.

I don't think age has anything to do with it. I do think, however, that this man was a prime example of how people have lost their ability to critically think through anything - even something as minor as the recorded message at their bank.

This lack of critical thinking skill is precisely what politicians and talk show hosts everywhere have learned to exploit. No one stops to ask if it makes any sense. All the talking heads want is the emotional gut reaction.

A Commissioned Piece

A co-worker friend of mine commissioned me to crochet a baby set for her soon to be born grandchild. A recent ultrasound revealed the baby will be a little girl. :-)

I need to practice my photography skills and get better at this, but you'll get the general drift.

On Suffering

I'll be following up with a lot of notes from my retreat, but I wanted to address the issue of suffering as it's been very prominently placed in my awareness these past few weeks leading up to and during my retreat. It'll come back up again in the retreat notes too.

My son's friend, who has been staying with us, found out the day before I left for retreat that his cousin had been shot and killed in Philadelphia. Just another young black man left for dead on the streets of Philadelphia with no word on the news because after over 200 such deaths, what's new about it?

He posted a blog on his MySpace page titled: Can I give you my loss.... to feel...to hold close...Can I give you my pain...To Feel..

He wants to know why. Why the suffering? Is this for God's pleasure? It's been the recurring theme lately. People asking, "Why the suffering? What kind of a God permits evil, or permits suffering?"

The danger in getting into answering these questions is that people ask them most often when they're really angry, and really hurt, and nothing less than a complete undoing of whatever is causing their pain will satisfy.

Well, we can't undo what's been done. In the merest nanosecond after the fact, it becomes a part of the unchangeable past.

There is no suitable explanation that will satisfy under those conditions. The answer has to be addressed to the intellect and when the soul is in pain, the intellect tends to close. One can only hope that the time will come when pain will subside, and the intellect will reopen.

When that time does come, we can consider the dilemma. Why would a God who creates all good and is all powerful allow so much suffering and harm come to his creation?

It's not a new question or series of questions. Scripture deals with them almost sequentially.

"People suck and they're getting worse. I don't know why God doesn't just wipe them all out and start over again clean." - Read the story of Noah. It's not only about the rainbow.

"If God knows everything that's in our hearts, then God should know who the really awful people are and wipe out only those people. Why wait? God knows they suck. Get rid of them now." - Read the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. It's not only about sodomy and salt.

"I'm a good person. I do everything I can to do the right thing. I'm nice to people. I don't screw people over. I know other people who are WAY worse than I am, and they seem to get all the good stuff! Meanwhile, my life sucks ass!" - Read the story of Job because it's not only about one guy's bad day.

The story of Job has probably the most succinct and forthright response for suffering in the world and while the answer is concise, it still deserves some consideration.

The message God gives to Job and his friends essentially says that unless we were around when the heavens were made, when the earth was formed, and when life was breathed upon the earth, we would have no way of knowing the why's and wherefore's about anything. So stop telling God how to do the job.

Maybe that seems harsh, but I was reminded of this when I came back to work after retreat and opened my e-mail. Dozens and dozens of unread messages scrolled across the screen in front of me with no way for me to know what they said unless I opened each and every one in turn. In order to manage them, I grouped them by subject, tried to prioritize them by what seemed most important, but I only had a subject line to go on.

Sometimes I could tell the importance of the message from reading the subject line. Many times I couldn't. The only possible way for me to know what was in those messages was to read them one.at.a.time.

In order for me to genuinely understand the universe and the workings of the world as God understands, I would have to be able to perceive the universe in all its entirety, both past, present, and future and all the possible outcomes for every action taken by all living creatures anywhere, and I would have to perceive them all at once.

It would be like having all of my e-mails opened before me on one screen and being able to not only comprehend every individual message, but each message's relationship to another, AND be able to prioritize them in order of importance, AANNNDDD answer them immediately with exactly the answer the writer hoped to receive.

We all know this is not how it happens. Here is what can happen - I open one e-mail and read the message. I get pissed off because I don't like the message. I think the writer of the message is a buffoon. I write a terse response that makes clear my opinion of the writer. I hit send.

Then I open the next message, which refutes all of my initial impressions. There are new developments not included in the original e-mail. New information is brought to light. The writer of the first e-mail wasn't a buffoon after all. The matter has been cleared up. I have no reason to be angry, and never did. Now I'm ass.

I know I'm not the only one who makes this mistake. I know because I've been on the receiving end of those "you're a buffoon" e-mails followed shortly by the "sorry I called you a buffoon. signed, the ass." apology e-mails.

If we can't get through one e-mail session without misunderstanding each other, misinterpreting words or actions, taking offense when none was meant simply because we do not have all the information, why would we ever consider ourselves capable of being able to understand the reasoning behind every moment passing in the universe? And yet, when a certain event makes no sense to us or causes us pain, we have no problem questioning the intelligence of God and coming to the conclusion that God must be a buffoon, if God exists at all!

Do I really want to have to extend to God the "sorry I called you a buffoon. signed, the ass." apology, or am I better off wrapping my head around the idea that maybe I don't know as much as I think I do?

Then there's the issue of "evil" versus "tragic". Catholic writers, particularly St. Augustine, wrote long and hard on the subject of evil, the privation of good, and other philosophical thoughts. If you ever get time to read any of it, many of them are very good, but my sense of them is that there's no distinction made between what is malevolently evil and what is simply tragic.

I think the distinction is important when it comes to deciding how much we want to assign to God as the perpetrator of evil, which I'll cover in another post.

If only the hand of God would truly smite the wicked.

And here is Fred Phelp's whole schtick in a nutshell:

"This will elevate me to something important," Phelps told reporters. "This was an act of futility."

Note - he doesn't say that this will elevate the Word of God, or God's message to something important. No, it will elevate Fred Phelps himself to something important.

Just another sad little man who believed he was destined for greatness and realized his life was as good as it was going to get.

Too bad he missed all the opportunities for fostering greatness from within. Had he focused on developing his own soul instead of condemning others, he might have actually done some good.

Now he's a raving lunatic with narcissistic obsession standing as evidence that God's justice is not always what we think it should be.