Crowded Skies

I may need to hire an air traffic controller for this blog. Sometimes the airspace in my head feels like the crowded skies above LAX. There are just too many things trying to land on one runway at the same time. Today, I’m just jot down the short list of topics that have popped up on the radar screen, each of which is likely to be cleared for a blog landing in near future.

Jill Carroll – as I watch this young woman plead for her life I ask myself, what are the good, decent God-fearing, God-loving Muslims around the world thinking when they watch her, and the many others who have been kidnapped and executed before her? Why aren’t these Muslims, who profess that the barbaric and inexcusable actions of radical Islamic terrorists bear no relationship to true Islam, massing in countless numbers and marching in cities around the world? How can they watch the holy names of Allah, Islam, and the Prophet Muhammad be used in this manner and remain, by and large, quiet. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of the Islamic faithful are marching throughout the world right now in protest of a series of blasphemous cartoons published in Denmark. Why can’t every one of them, and millions others, see what is being “published” daily by Islamic terrorists around the world and declare it to be infinitely more blasphemous than these cartoons? Why doesn’t blood trump ink every time? I get a snippet of Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim wisdom from Beliefnet.com each morning. Today’s Muslim wisdom is a powerful quote from the Prophet Muhammad: “He who is deprived of gentleness is deprived of good.” Amen.

Dick Cheney – if he directed his chief of staff, Scooter Libby, to release Valerie Plame’s name to the press, then he needs to go back to Wyoming and his little spread on the backside of Brokeback Mountain. Cheney scares me. There’s something cold and calculating about him that just isn’t right for someone holding down the job of Mr. Next-In-Line. May God bless George W. Bush.

I’m a sucker for the Olympic spirit. I enjoyed every minute of the opening ceremony of the Winter Games in Torino last night. I never grow tired of watching young, vibrant people transcend boundaries and differences to share the world stage based on their common love of something other than what resides within those fabricated boundaries and differences. When they united to sing John Lennon’s Imagine last night, many of us watching were actually able to do just that – imagine a better world than the one these young people have left behind for 17 days. You know, it’s easy if you try. We’re just not trying as hard as we should.

There is a backside to these Olympics. Four years ago our family watched most of the Winter Games held in Salt Lake City while sitting beside Danny’s bed in the Kaiser Permanente Hospital on Sunset Boulevard in LA. When Dan’s dad and step-mom were with him, my wife and I would retreat to our home in Bakersfield and watch the games as an R&R escape from the war being fought in that room. I suspect the Winter Games will forever bring bittersweet flashbacks to the winter of our discontent in 2002.