Traveling in Place

The Service Industry

On Friday night, my family decided to eat out.  I enjoy going to a restaurant, ordering off a menu, letting someone else worry about cooking and cleaning, and spending time visiting both before and after a meal. 

There are some things about eating out, however, that I don’t enjoy.  At the top of the list is the moment the waitress comes to the table and says, “Hi, my name is _______ and I’ll be taking care of you.”

Have you noticed that waiters and waitresses at all the major chain restaurants begin with this line?  Who thought it was a good idea?  I don’t want to be “taken care of.”  I’m not a child.  I’m not incontinent.  I do not need help eating my food.  I’m paying for someone to take my “order,” cook my food, and bring it to me.  I would much prefer my waiter or waitress to tell me, “I’ll be your server” or “I’ll be your waiter tonight.” 

But I always know that line is coming, so when I notice a restaurant employee approaching our table, I just bury my head in the menu until the moment has passed.  On Friday, our experience of being “taken care of” kept getting more interesting.  Our first waitress, I’ll call her Alexis, informed us that she was also working with (I’ll call her) Missy, and we could call on either one of them if we needed help.  After Alexis took our drink order and went to fill it, Missy came and introduced herself to us, and also introduced (I’ll call her) Debbie, who was training with her.  Missy informed us that we could call upon her, Alexis, or Debbie if we needed anything.

Broken Federal Government and New Ways Forward

“Oh, hell, no. Now it’s just sharp elbows, and instead of having a caucus where you sit down and say, ‘What are you going to do for your country?’ you sit figuring out how to screw the other side.” – Alan Simpson, former Republican Senator from Wyoming, on whether he would ever run for office again.

It’s the quote of the month.  Simpson didn’t say anything we didn’t already know, but against the backdrop of the partisan brinksmanship that threatens to send our nation into default and hurl us into economic calamity just to make a political point, his words make us shudder.  Surely not all our elected representatives in Washington are as vicious as Simpson’s words suggest, but even if a fair number of them – a critical mass of them – have stooped to this level of vitriol, we are in serious trouble.  It means that party is more important than country, and political victory is more important than getting things done. 

Washington is broken.  You can’t get elected to Congress without saying that it is broken and that you know how to fix it.  But it turns out that the politicians most determined to fix it are also least likely to work across the aisle to make compromises and fashion legislation.  This current crowd of a-political politicians makes one wistful for the good ol’ days of partisan gridlock.  Back then, the problem was that government moved too slowly, but at least the gears turned.  We’ve now devolved into the politics of mutually assured destruction.  It’s OK to blow up the system just to prove that I’m right and you’re wrong.  The founders who carved out our system of government through a series of painstaking compromises would not only be appalled – they would be grief-stricken.

Time Out for a Mountain Hike

Time for a break from social commentary, theology, and spiritual reflection.  Early this week, I felt summoned away from all the cares and concerns of my pastoral work.  Sometimes, God just wants to have fun. 

On Wednesday, the day before nature’s furnace sent temps soaring above 100 degrees here in upstate New York, my son Alex and I journeyed north for a summer hike.  We drove to the Adirondack Loj near Lake Placid and took in the 6-mile trek up Mt. Colden via Lake Arnold.  With an elevation of 4,714 feet, Colden ranks number 11 among the High Peaks.  Its steep Western slides rise sharply from Avalanche Lake.  It sits between the two highest peaks - Marcy to the East and Algonquin to the west.

Recovering Our Memory

According to Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow, Internet search engines are changing the way we remember information.  Instead of remembering data, we remember where we can find it.  We rely on the Internet to hold information for us so we don’t have to store it in our own minds.  Sparrow, along with colleagues Jenny Liu and Dan Wegner, published the results of their research in the July 14 issue of the journal Science.  They say the Internet has become a form of  “transactive” memory – “recollections that are external to us but that we know when and how to access” (see scienceblog.com).

This development is the latest stage in a long process of human beings detaching ourselves from what we know.  For most of history, men and women relied on personal experience, hearing, and memory for everything they knew.  Our ancestors learned skills by doing, and they learned stories, songs, and sacred texts by listening to those who passed them along orally.  The few pre-literate societies still in existence today, such as in the bush of Africa, continue to demonstrate highly developed listening skills and amazing recall, which are necessary for survival.

Even the first university students in medieval Europe depended upon their ears and their memory to learn anything in class.  They did not have paper and pencil to take notes, nor audio recording devices to check the accuracy of their notes later.  Instead, they sat and listened intently as their professors lectured them on their areas of expertise.  The only way for students to retain what they learned was by listening and memorizing.  The only way professors could test their students’ knowledge was through oral exams.

Discerning the Covenant of Marriage (Part 2)

As Christian communities continue to wrestle with the subject of gay marriage (as opposed to dismissing it out of hand), many are surprised to realize that, among all same-sex couples, those who desire to be married in a public Christian ceremony are the most conservative.

They stand in contrast to other gay and lesbian couples who choose not be married at all because they regard marriage itself as an oppressive institution.  They also stand apart from same-sex couples who are only interested in civil marriage because they have rejected Christianity as inherently discriminatory towards women and homosexuals.

Neither the anti-marriage crowd nor the anti-Christian group is challenging Christian churches to broaden their understanding of marriage.  The same-sex couples who attend church are people of faith who are often clearer about their Christianity than many of the rest of us because they’ve had to work out their beliefs in the face of rejection by other Christians.  They are asking the church to hold them accountable to a monogamous, life-long union for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in heath, ’til death do they part.  That is a very traditional choice. 

The False Choice of Abortion Politics

Recently, the Public Religion Research Institute released results of a comprehensive poll on Americans’ attitudes toward abortion and gay marriage.  The results are fascinating, and will be tantalizing to the purists on these issues, but they are not at all surprising to me.  In this post, I will focus on the issue of abortion.

The poll reveals that 56% of Americans believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 40% say it should be illegal in all or most cases.   These responses are basically the same as they were in 1999, and therefore not very interesting.  What is interesting is the complexity of responses inside this basic dichotomy. 

First, the terms “pro-life” and “pro-choice” are not regarded as opposing labels, but complimentary.  Nearly 7 in 10 Americans call themselves “pro-choice.”  About two-thirds refer to themselves as “pro-life.”  In other words, a significant number of Americans see themselves as both.  This result is consistent with a second statistic – 52% believe abortion is morally wrong, while 56% believe it should be legal in most or all cases.  The poll reveals that about 28% of us have “mixed” views about abortion – or at least that’s the term used in the report. 

(Mis)Remembering American History

The recent flap over presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann’s version of early American history (“the founding fathers worked tirelessly to end slavery”), right on the heels of Sarah Palin’s contorted version of Paul Revere’s ride (firing warning shots at the British and ringing bells, both while on horseback) has sparked a national conversation about early American history.

The Palin gaffe is silly on its face.  And Bachmann’s indefensible comment would not be worth the press it is getting had she clarified it in a defensible way.  But when asked to name one founding father who worked to end slavery, she proffered John Quincy Adams, who was eight years old when the Revolutionary War began, and only 20 when the Constitutional Convention concluded.  She was right that John Quincy Adams opposed slavery, and would also have been right to name his father, John Adams, as a true founder who opposed slavery.  Trouble is, on the issue of slavery, Adams was a minority voice during both the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention.