Jehovah's Witnesses Go Postal

These days, it's truly unusual for me to get a handwritten envelope in the mail. None of my friends are Amish, so I tend to get most of my correspondence by electronic means. Even my mom, in her mid 70's, has started sending me birthday cards by e-mail.

Today I was a little more than surprised when I got an envelope in the mail with a cursive script address. At first I thought it was one of those computer-generated mass mailings with the fake handwriting that intends to fool you into thinking someone wrote you a letter, but it was the real McCoy. For a second I thought maybe it was my mom, sending a newspaper clipping about something I last cared about in the ninth grade. Nope, not her handwriting.

These days, you really need to be careful what you open, but I forgot that when I tore open the envelope. Inside was a handwritten note, along with a small pamphlet. The note read:

Dear Mr. ________ :

My husband and I live in your area. We do not Know You Personally, but We have some important information to share. A sample is enclosed in a tract.

We have tried in the past to contact you With No Success. We realize most people are Very busy today.

As a Bible Student We are sharing as Volunteers in a Worldwide Work being done in over 234 Lands.

If after reading the enclosed Tract you are interested, contact us at the above address.

Sincerely,
Eleanor Myers
Jehovah's Witness

This led me to wonder: have the Jehovah's Witnesses gotten so lazy that they are resorting to letter writing instead of knocking on doors? Not that I'm complaining -- I really don't want to talk about God with people who won't celebrate their own birthdays -- but come on, put a little effort into it, guys. I didn't realize that if I want to be proselytized, I have to be the one doing most of the work.

Or maybe they've finally gotten the hint? Have they gotten so weary of rejection that they're mailing out letters in the half-hearted hopes that someone will actually take the bait? Maybe it's the redemption lottery: the more letters you send, the more likely that one person will respond.

Come to think of it, there's a big opportunity here that millions of people have probably hoped for yet never had. What would Mrs. Eleanor Myers do if I showed up at her door and wouldn't leave until she accepted SpongeBob Square Pants as her personal savior?

It's tempting, but why take the chance?

Only in New York.....

Apparently they get a rabbi to say "om" over the food as it's prepared...

The hazards of equality

When first named to lead Hewlett-Packard, Carly Fiorina was asked what it felt like to be the first female CEO of a major high tech company. "I don't know," she famously said. "I don't know what it's like to be a male CEO." Admirably, she downplayed the impact of her gender on her role, acknowledging that she had been raised with the belief that she could achieve whatever she wanted. Her upbringing had been tempered neither with the message that she was held back from some things because she's female, nor that she had to work and fight all that much harder because she's a woman. If she worked hard, she could succeed. She confronted her share of discrimination along the way, but she faced it and overcame it, as any ambitious person would.

When Carly ran into difficulties at HP and ultimately was very publicly relieved of her duties, some pundits opined that she never really fit in because she was a woman in a male-dominated industry. Never mind that HP has quite a good track record of promoting and hiring on merit, regardless of gender. Never mind that she showed immediate and persistent disdain for the company's much heralded consensus-based culture. And never mind that her own substantial hubris had kept her from adapting her strategy when it proved unworkable.

It led me to think: we've achieved equality only when we have the chance to fail equally as spectacularly as we want to succeed. If women are to be judged on their own merits, we have to take the bad with the good. If we want a fair opportunity to succeed, we have to be willing to suffer the consequences of failure. To expect otherwise is to ask for preferential treatment -- just the thing feminists fought against when it was granted solely to white men.

If people in a business - or a society - expect to be treated fairly in a meritocracy, it seems to me that they'd want to be judged solely on what they achieve and the talents they bring to the table. They wouldn't want to be granted a mulligan after they err. If you insist on swinging from the mens' tees, you can't demand the womens' handicap when your shot misses the hole by five feet. Yes, it stinks to fail, and yes, it really stinks to lose something you've worked so hard and so long to gain. But that's what makes it so precious to win in the first place.

Said another way, "They wouldn't let me succeed because I am a woman" is the flip side of "they only gave me a chance because I am a woman." No ambitious person - male or female, Caucasian or otherwise - wants to be judged that way.

Maybe history doesn't remember those who come in second place, or the people who fail. At the same time, it does remember those who recover and go on to win. (Just look at the '69 Mets) I think that the real prize of equality is getting the opportunity to bounce back from failure or setbacks.

Here's to more second acts. And more chances to risk spectacular failure.

Meet me halfway, dude: dress the part.

What's the deal with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? I'm not going to get into politics ... we all know the guy is both deranged and evil. I'm talking about his image:

Why can't the guy wear a tie?

In every picture I've seen, he's wearing a sport jacket and a dress shirt with one or two buttons unbuttoned. It's not a bad look, but come on. The guy seems to think that it's casual Friday every day. Isn't it reasonable to expect this guy to find a respectable outfit befitting an evil despot?

Every self-respecting dictator or deranged leader puts some thought into an evil costume -- a look he makes his own. It's like the villains in Batman or Superman. Think about it: Kim Jong Il has that weird hair. Castro has made the rumpled fatigues look his trademark. Khadafi has had two distinct looks: when he was an axis of evil guy, he had that snappy army uniform with a bit too much ornamentation. Now, as a man of peace, he's got the Arab getup.

You dress as any one of them (or someone worse, as Prince Harry discovered) for Halloween, and people immediately know who you are. Dress like Ahmadinejad, and people assume you had to work late and didn't have the time to change before you came to the party. You look like that guy on the NJ Transit train who had a rough day, pulled off his tie and started drinking beer out of a can smuggled in a paper bag. Let's face it - it's one step better than the lame "let me cut a few eyeholes in a sheet and I'll go as a ghost" costume.

Now, I have nothing against the casual, no-tie look. Most men can pull it off. But does it command respect? Does it engender fear? I'd say no. For a lot of guys, it wouldn't even get them a date at a singles dance. So Ahmadinejad thinks it's going to ensure him permanent status in the Axis of Evil? Seems mighty doubtful.

What's funny is that Katie Couric recently noted the mnemonic she uses to remember the pronunciation of his name: "I'm a dinner jacket."

The new social disease

You carry it without knowing. After staying out all night. Even in the best hotels.You can never tell who's afflicted. Sometimes they don’t even know, until the embarrassing hives and itching appear.Herpes? The clap? No (well, maybe, but not here). It’s bedbugs.

Yes, bedbugs, the scourge of tenements and, well, the 18th century, are back. Bedbugs (or bed bugs) are small nocturnal insects of the family Cimicidae that live by hematophagy, feeding on the blood of humans and other warm-blooded hosts. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? Resurgent due to increased global travel and the banning of DDT, they’re showing up all over the place, and they’re remarkably insidious. From a health standpoint, they’re pretty much harmless, except for the aforementioned itching and hives. Oh, and their uncanny ability to drive their host into a spiral of madness.

I had the unfortunate privilege of bringing these tiny hitchhikers home from an August trip to Ireland, a country which, as you know, has had reasonable sanitary standards for quite some time. Roaming the countryside of County Kerry, I assumed I was running the risk of picking up some sort of sheep scourge from all of the scat I stepped in, but I never expected bugs.I stayed in five different hotels, all of which seemed nice and clean. There was no reason to believe that they harbored any insects that wanted to come home with me.Then again, one of my college roommates said the same thing about one of her Friday night hookups, and that one required a visit to the health center after a few days. (Itching and rash, oddly enough.)

Anyway, all seemed fine through September. I attributed a few small itchy spots to a stray mosquito that might have made its way through a window screen somehow. Then came the onslaught.By the time I found them in October, I had a nice rash of bites on my back, arms and legs. I discovered a bunch of sated bedbugs on the underside of my spare bed pillow, deceased after happily engorging themselves on my blood. Yeech.

If you're unlucky and took months to determine the cause of your misery, the little fu- I mean suckers -- will have totally infested all of your bedroom furniture and perhaps the cracks and crevices of the walls and floorboards and... well, you get the picture. I had a relatively minor case, which I determined had come in from the luggage I'd brought to Ireland and stored underneath my bed.

As you can read in the Wikipedia entry, the next step involves basically boiling all of your bed clothes, all of the clothes in the furniture anywhere close to your bed, and then vacuuming the living daylights out of your bedroom. Then you get the pest control guy in. I say "pest control" instead of "exterminator" because he or she can't do it all. Even when they reach every living bedbug during a visit, it's not over. You end up becoming a partner in the eradication, vacuuming and boiling clothes and changing your sheets almost obsessively. While the poisons or enzymes or whatever the professional used are good, they still won't kill the eggs, so you have to wait for them to hatch and then murder the nymphs. I guarantee you'll be seeing your new best friend, the pest control guy, at least once again. Fortunately they include a second and third visit in their fees. They know.

Oh, and they'll encase your newly treated mattress and boxspring in vinyl covers so the bugs that are in the bedding can't get out. You've got to leave the covers on for a minimum of a year until the bugs all die off (yes, they can live that long without another meal). I chose to look at the positive side: if I ever start wetting the bed, at least I won't wreck the mattress.

Unluckily for me, all of this happened during a very hectic and stressful time at work, when I was working longer hours and coming home totally exhausted. I was in no state to change the sheets, boil the crap out of them and vacuum like June Cleaver on speed. I had no time to have the bug control guys come back for the second visit, so when the bugs reappeared, I did the best I could with the enzyme solution the pest guys left me. I smoothed cortisone cream over the hives to control the itching.

And meanwhile, I was going absolutely mental at work with the stress of my job and the anguish of these little fuckers literally sucking my lifeblood out of me when I didn't have the strength to do anything about it. Not fun. I bought a few six packs of Guinness, not just to appease the Irish bedbug gods, but to get absolutely plastered to forget them for a while.

You really start wondering why they chose you, of anyone, to come home with. What, were they expecting to sleep with me and get their little green cards? This country is so set on keeping terrorists out of the country that they're harassing perfectly innocent people, when they could be sending these #*$&@^ to Guantanamo instead.

But I digress.Back to the social disease aspect. If you're dealing with a bedbug issue, you have to be careful who you tell, because you're apt to be classified as a moron or as someone in deep denial. Or maybe a hypochondriac. Very few people know about them and that having them is not an indication of poor hygiene or sleeping around in fleabag motels. Many people will tell you that you should have the pest control guys show up day after day after day and bomb the place. They'll tell you to throw out the mattress and boxspring and maybe the whole bed. When you tell them that those options won't help (and often mean that you'll pay good money for a new bed that will eventually get infested, too), they'll look at you like you're delusional. Everyone's an entomologist.

I couldn't do much at work but suffer the anger of my boss for all of the fuck-ups I was committing on some major projects. No way was I going to go chapter and verse into my angst-inducing infestation. Maybe I should have, but I figured it wasn't worth looking both incompetent and delusional.

The social life suffers, too. Forget about inviting overnight visitors over. Imagine the conversation:

"Uh, before you come over with your toothbrush and a change of clothes, there's something I have to tell you."

"Oh, boy. Do you have herpes? Hey, it's okay, I'll wear a condom or three."

"Uh, no, I have bedbugs."

"Good God!" *noise of screeching tires as the guy can't get away from you quickly enough*

Let's face it, no condom is big enough to cover the whole body. Well, unless the guy is really, really small, in which case he has enough problems to deal with.

So, bottom line, you've gotta be careful. The world is divided into two types of people: those who've had bedbugs, and those who will. The only solace is to remember that they were pretty much ubiquitous before the invention of DDT. Our ancestors survived them just fine. Except they were really, really itchy.

American culture creep manifests itself in weird ways.

Indigenous cultures around the world have a variety of religions and faiths, having escaped the incursion of missionaries spreading the various flavors of European and American Christianity. The South Pacific island chain of Vanuatu, however, persists in an American-influenced, yet not-Christian religion: the cargo cult of Jon Frum.

The natives of these islands saw their first white man and their first glimpse of modern convenience during World War II as the Allies hopscotched their way through the Pacific. In their airplanes and ships, these visitors brought jeeps and canned food and a host of other mysterious and alluring items that must have seemed otherworldly to the natives.

Then the war ended and the visits from the white (and black) men stopped. The desire for their gifts, however, did not. When weeks and months passed without further gifts from the skies and seas, a legend, and then a faith emerged. The white man would come from his otherworldly place, with gifts of Spam and Coca-Cola, and maybe even a washing machine. Jon would come Frum America, his heavenly home. The Vanuatuans even built airstrips to ease his return, specifically on the island of Tanna. They also created a Jon Frum flag of a red cross on a white background. Not to denote Christianity, of course, but to represent the flag so many of the white men worked under.

Lest you think that this is some sort of materialistic, possession-based culture, consider one of the basic tenets of the cult. As a sign of faith, members are encouraged to throw away all money and let their land go to seed. They believe that Jon Frum will provide all. Eventually.

Over the years, some Vanuatans claimed to have a special gift that enabled them to hear Jon Frum from deep in the earth. These seers claim that Jon will be coming soon... yet he never does.

Their provider's reticence, however, doesn't stop the islanders. In fact, it only provokes more devotion. Every February 15, they celebrate Jon Frum Day, the expected date of his return to Vanuatu. Members of the Tanna Army (a tribute to the US Army, created on Frum's behalf) conduct a parade, with "USA" painted on their bare chests and carrying crudely-fashioned US flags.

Weird, yeah, but when you look at it, it's not that much different from any other religion -- salvation, gifts for the believers, an unseen provider. Most faiths, however, aren't based on the delivery of fresh C-rations.

Anyway, there's also a Prince Philip cult somewhere in the Hebrides, but that's a different story.

September 11 Memorial... Small Town New Jersey
Late December 2006

The Holidays

A few thoughts on holidays and merriment:

I live in a part of the country where the population is very diverse. Jew, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Sikh, Bahai, and every denomination of Christian. You name it. Thus, around this time of year, you hear a lot of "happy holiday" greetings, and not a lot of "Merry Christmas," "Happy Hanukkah," and so forth.

Now, I'm all for inclusiveness and consideration, but I'm struck by how silly all of this can get. After all, the day is what it is. In my mind, they're all an opportunity to party and have fun, and can't we all use more of that?Do we not say "happy new year" on January 1, despite the fact that the Chinese and Jews and the Bahai, among others, celebrate the new year on other dates? Let me tell you, the Chinese know how to throw a new year's party, so why not have two new year's parties and celebrate with them. I mean, with this agnostic logic people are throwing around, no-one would say "happy birthday" to anyone but themselves or someone else who was born on the same date. So, really, what's wrong with saying 'happy whatever' on the right day?

Another thing: Santa Claus. Around this time of year, you inevitably hear some psychologist on the TV or radio talking about the right time to tell a child the truth about the jolly fat man. Should a parent tell the child before classmates do? How do you tell them?

So many questions, and so much tsimmis. Seems to me that the answer to the Santa question is simple. Who's questioning a stranger who leaves you presents with no expectation of the favor of a return gift? Sure, he sneaks into your house, but who cares, as long as he doesn't walk off with your Playstation? What's so bad about letting kids believe in that as long as humanly possible? There's a Jewish saying about one of the highest forms of charity being a gift where the recipient doesn't know who the giver is. Seems to me that the concept of Santa Claus helps perpetuate that concept. It's a pretty darn nice one, I think you'll agree.

Parents will tell you they might as well fess up because their kids are smart and will easily figure out that it's Mom and Dad who are leaving the toys under the tree. I submit that those are exactly the kids who are going to keep the faith in Santa for as long as possible in the hopes of getting more and more interesting stuff from the jolly fat dude. I mean, why question it? It's just more fun to keep up the charade.

And it also means that you get it all for the price of putting out some cookies and milk. Not a bad deal.

PR Lady's limerick

She was a doctor of spin
With sound argument she'd always win
Negotiations did fail
When she stepped off the trail
And sank in straight up to her chin.

Coincidence... or Karma?

On September 25, 2005, Tenzin Gyatso, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama visited Rutgers University, speaking to a capacity crowd at the school's football stadium.

Three months later, the Rutgers football team was invited to play in a bowl game for the first time in 27 years.

This year, Rutgers football is among the top 15 in the nation, standing at eight wins, no losses to date.

Coincidence? Even considering the dharma of peaceful nonviolence, you have to wonder. Is the Dalai Lama a Rutgers fan, and did he leave some special karma on the Banks of the old Raritan?

UPDATE: I am becoming even more convinced there is some sort of karmic thing going on here. Miraculously, Rutgers won against third-ranked Louisville on November 9, on a field goal in the final seconds of the game ... after missing a first field goal that was declared a do-over when the opposing team committed an offside. The goalposts? Standing in the end zone where the Dalai Lama's stage had stood.

Shock ... awe

Buh-bye!

May we recommend a nice retirement cottage in the beautiful resort town of Tikrit?

Ghosts of Halloweens Past

When I was a kid, I never got to celebrate Halloween, or at least it seemed. My parents have home movies of me and my sister in costumes made from Butterick patterns – Jean was a witch with orange yarn hair hanging from her pointy black felt hat, while the four-year-old me was a ghost with a great big black “BOO” sewn across my front. The next year, I was a bride, and being in first grade, I was eligible to march in the elementary school Halloween pageant. I barely made it through that day at school, and by the time afternoon trick-or-treating came around, I was home in bed with a fever.

That was the start of the sick streak. Like clockwork, I’d come down with the flu, or a cold, or general malaise, during the fourth week of October. Like clockwork, I’d beg my mom to let me go trick or treating nonetheless, and like clockwork, I’d be stuck in bed, listening forlornly as other kids came to ring our doorbell and shout gleefully for treats.

It wasn’t so much the loss of candy that frustrated me. It was the loss of an opportunity to be creative. Every fall, I’d come up with a great costume idea, only to be disappointed, betrayed by my own body. But one year was different.

As the U.S. was starting to get Bicentennial fever, I found the perfect costume idea. I’d be Sybil Ludington. Who didn’t know Sybil? She was the teenager who, in 1777, basically pulled a Paul Revere to organize the militia after a British attack on Danbury, Connecticut. I already had a tri-corner hat from a visit to Philadelphia, and my mom had made me a cape the year before. Conveniently it was made of red, white and blue fabric.

All I needed was a horse. Hmm. Inspiration struck in the form of brown trash bags, some old boxes and a roll of masking tape. After a bit of engineering, I had my horse, complete with a hole in the middle so I could slip it over my head down to my waist. I was set for Halloween!


Then, as the date approached, I felt the flu coming over me. I fought it as much as I could, but on October 31, I had to concede. I was weak and weary, and there was no way I could go to school. It was hopeless.

I was resigned to having all of that good work go to waste, but I still half-heartedly petitioned my mom to let me go trick-or-treating for a half hour, just to take the horse out for a trot. I knew there was no chance; she was the type of parent who firmly believed the truant officers would see me out gallivanting and would send HER to reform school as punishment. A stickler for the rules, she was, and heavily motivated by shame.

Imagine my surprise when she took pity on me and said, sure, go out. Just be careful, and if you start feeling sick, come home. I didn’t give her a chance to change her mind. Faster than you could say “The British are coming,” I donned my cape, hat and horse and was out the door.

The truant officer wasn’t on the street, but some of my classmates were, jibing me for trick-or-treating when I didn’t go to school, as if they wouldn’t have done the same. Despite my declining energy, it was great to be out there, knocking on doors and collecting candy. Countless times I told people no, I wasn’t Paul Revere, and educated them about Sybil Ludington. And several nice people gave me a candy bar for me, and another one for my horse. Not a bad deal all together.

Looking back, I don’t think I lasted 15 minutes before I started feeling queasy, so it’s a good thing I had the horse to increase my draw of loot. Unlike my costume’s inspiration, I might have gotten three blocks or so in my route, but as I walked home, I felt as if I was on the victory lap. I’d finally gotten to go trick or treating, and I’d spread the word on Sybil Ludington, a significant footnote in American history.

The funny thing is that after that year, I was healthy every Halloween, just as I was getting too old for trick-or-treating, anyway. I guess that’s the breaks.

Purell, anyone?

A front page story in today's New York Times notes that many contemporary politicians are taking special steps to reduce their exposure to germs during the customary pressing-of-the-flesh during campaign season. In fact, the wife of a Kansas congressman recently went as far as to squirt sanitizing gel on the hands of people who were waiting to shake hands with Vice President Cheney when he was campaigning for her husband.

No word on whether those same people were looking for Purell to sanitize their hands after shaking hands with Cheney. God only knows what kind of plague they picked up from that bodily contact.

Fall in the Watchungs

?????

Today's New York Times Magazine featured a Q&A with former Attorney General John Ashcroft, who's apparently shilling his new book Never Again. As I read the interview, I had one of those "huh?" realizations that gave me one brief, glimmering moment of hope.

One of the questions read, in part, "Would you still defend the president's willingness to disregard the Geneva Conventions in the treatment and torture of suspected terrorists?"

Ashcroft's response: "I think there is a very sound argument for saying that those who violate the Geneva Conventions should not benefit from its provisions."

Now, wait. One could take that as him saying that if we violate the Geneva rules, we can't expect that our soldiers will be treated humanely if they are captured. Am I reading correctly? Is John Ashcroft -- Bush's former attorney general -- agreeing with those who disagree with Bush on torture? Say it ain't so!

Well, folks, sorry to disappoint you , but it ain't so, as the rest of the interview made abundantly clear. Well, at least the part that didn't talk about his beliefs as an evangelical Christian.

The catacombs of Paris

Beneath the streets of Paris are the famed catacombs. Originally a series of quarries built in Roman times, the tunnels were first used for the gory purpose in the late 1700's, when mass graves in standard cemeteries were blamed for the spread of disease. In the second World War, both the French Resistance and the Nazis used the catacombs for their own purposes.

In current times, the catacombs have become a popular tourist destination, accessible through a rather low-key street level door. Once through the entrance visitors descend a circular stairway to the tunnels below.

The scene once you're there is both eerie and intriguing. Bones are piled against the walls, many segregated by type (arms and legs in one pile, skulls stacked in another), and all piles labeled with a sign noting which cemetery they came from, and when. You could just reach out and touch them, but there's that feeling that a bony hand might reach out to touch you back.

Once you've walked through the open portion of the catacombs, you take another stairway up to street level. It's all rather pedestrian, except for the very end. Just before you go outside, you're stopped by two gatekeepers who stand before a sign with the international "No" symbol drawn over a crudely drawn skull and crossbones. The gatekeepers insist -- in French -- on examining your bags to see if you're trying to smuggle out a souvenir.

As if. Try explaining to the TSA what that tibia-shaped thing is that they scanned in your carry-on luggage.

When you point at someone, remember, there are four fingers pointing back at you.

Now, shut up and eat your clam broth.

Keys...

Many, many years ago, I used to take short road trips with a friend named Marty. He'd come down from NJIT on a lark, pick me up at my Rutgers dorm and we'd head down Route 27, which eventually became Nassau Street and downtown Princeton.

Acutely aware of the ancient history between Rutgers and Princeton, we'd gone down there a few times at night, plotting the revival of the college rivalry which had died years before. In truth, I think we were a bit in awe of the place. We were both bright kids, good grades and College Boards and all that, but had ended up at state schools. Rutgers has its share of ivy covered walls, but it had long before cut its ties to the Ivy League, and few of its students seemed to care about tradition. I, on the other hand, knew all four verses of the Alma Mater. Marty did, too, even though it wasn't actually his school. Plus I'd just read This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald's chronicle of an angst-ridden Princeton boy. So... it wasn't out of character for us to travel the half hour distance to get some of the tradition back.

One late afternoon, in particular, we found our way down the road and began the unusual (for us) task of wandering around campus in daylight. We decided that we'd see if we could get into Old Nassau, the first building the college constructed. We'd long joked about what we'd do if we were able to break in.

Surprisingly enough, the front door opened when Marty tried the old doorknob, and we found ourselves in a large entryway with marble walls. We walked from one panel to the next, reading the names of the Princeton graduates who'd lost their lives in every American war since the Revolution. The room was quiet for a few moments, but for the footsteps of a campus policeman.

I apologized for being there, figuring we'd gone into forbidden territory, but he said it was okay. "I'm just closing up for the day." He led us out to the front step, asking us about our interest in the building. We chatted for a bit, and then he said he had to finish his rounds.

"They'd kill me if I lost this," he said, pulling a large, centuries-old key from his pocket. As the policeman inserted it into the keyhole and turned it, Marty's eyes met mine, and we shared a smile. He knew what I was thinking: at Rutgers' main building, Old Queens, they'd probably replaced the original lock with a new one. Not long ago, I checked and found it to be so.

Random meeting, lessons learned

On meeting people on my random wanderings around, I sometimes get perspective I didn't expect to receive.

Last year, when I went to an event at the Thomas Edison National Historic Site, my impromptu tour group included an inquisitive New York Times photographer. As we went through various aspects of the site, he continually asked questions, taking more than the usual bored reporter's interest in the subject. Later, when the park ranger was demonstrating how phonograph cylinders were recorded, the photographer practically became part of the story, wedging himself in near the musician and the phonograph technician.

Later on, I noticed him outside one of the buildings and remarked to him that he appeared to truly enjoy his job. As we chatted, I got a quick glance at his press badge and saw his name was Dith Pran. Almost on impulse, I said, "Oh, you're Dith Pran... Sidney Schanberg!"

If you've seen the movie The Killing Fields , you're familiar with their story. During the Vietnam War, Dith had worked as a freelance photographer with New York Times reporter Schanberg. When all the Americans were getting out of Cambodia, Dith was in peril because he had been working with Americans. Schanberg got kicked out of the country but couldn’t get passage for Dith, leaving him to make his way through the Cambodian wilderness for three years, trying not to be caught by the marauding Khmer Rouge. Meanwhile, a guilt-wracked Schanberg tried to find his friend and bring him to the US. Eventually they were reunited, and Schanberg helped him get the Times job.

Dith nodded at my mention of Schanberg and told me he really likes his job because he learns a lot of interesting things and meets nice people. He asked me about my interest in Edison, and where I live, mentioning that he has taken a lot of pictures at a park near my home. We chatted for a few more minutes and then parted ways, agreeing that we might cross paths again.

Food for thought. He seems like a happy guy ... taking human interest photos around New York and New Jersey for the Times, perfectly content with the direction his life has taken. I unwittingly gave him the perfect in to start commenting on the miseries of his life -- miseries that few of us could ever conceive of experiencing -- but he didn't. Kinda gives you pause about how great it is that people can come here after such horrible life experiences, and enjoy having a “normal,” mundane life.

His kindness and apparent lack of bitterness made me curious, so I Googled him to recall the whole story. What I found truly struck me. He has created the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project , to bring the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge to light. I was truly awed by his directions of How you can make a difference. In addition to a call to boost Congressional awareness of the injustice of letting the genocidal maniacs get away with their reprehensible acts, he takes a truly Buddhist approach to hatred:

• Don’t react to other people’s anger. When you react, it makes the situation much worse. Anger is a very powerful, negative emotion. Emotion is not the equivalent to logic so no matter how hard you try to reason with people whose minds are filled with anger, they cannot listen to you. Use your energy for something positive instead! When the situation calms down, hopefully then you can work things out.
  
• Have tolerance for people of different races and backgrounds. There is no benefit to dislike people just because they are different than you. You heard that wise, old saying, "United we stand, divided we fall." After all, we all share the same planet. Let’s make it a better place. Hatred is not the way.

It definitely makes you realize that, as the Buddhists say, "Pain is inevitable. Suffering is not." Dith takes peace and tolerance as his guiding principles, after all he's seen and experienced. He clearly believes in the potential of personal action, as well. As individuals, we may not be able to change the world with grand gestures, but we can make an impact on our immediate surroundings. Who knows where that can lead us?

Where's Osama?

Five years ago, on an idyllic late summer day turned surreal and so tragic, I can remember my fear that those who attacked us just a few miles away would take everything I hold dear as an American. The attack on our native soil, the death of thousands of innocent people who were just trying to earn a living ... what would the then-unknown murderers deny us, just because of where we happened to be born? What would we have to do to protect our rights, our freedom?

As an American, I have always treasured my right to think what I want, to say what I want, and to associate with those I want to. Though it's often painful and a bit scary, I've always respected the right of others to speak their minds, however unpopular their opinions. It's part of the equation. With the right to free speech comes the responsibility to let others say what they want. Perhaps to disagree, but always to let them speak.

Patriotism isn't blind allegiance. It's knowing what's right and good about one's country, and having the courage and strength to speak up to protect it, no matter the assailant. That was both the fear and the rage that burned in me that day: rage against the enemy and fear that I would have to channel it into action.

What I never expected on that September day was that my own government would be the biggest threat to our liberties. I never expected to be told that if I disagreed with the president, I was an enemy of the state ("If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists."). I never expected that our fear would be cynically co-opted to divert our attention from the real enemy to settle a personal grudge against a despot who had nothing to do with the attack.

The hijackers hated America enough to kill themselves in the attack. Now even more people hate America with a passion, and we brought it on ourselves. What good does it do?

More people have died in Iraq in the past three and a half years than did on that September day, and it's only put us in greater danger. When will it stop?

Meanwhile the real enemy is out there. And perhaps he wraps himself in the American flag.

Where's Osama, Mr. Bush, and why don't you care?