The worst part is that it doesn't really seem to be affecting us like it should. Due to the proximity of the first anniversary of Dad's death, we're all feeling so numb right now, and with having to deal with Spooky's death in between the two, I fear that we may, in a sick way, be getting too accustomed to death.

Labels: family

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I hadn't expected that the anniversary would hit me as hard as it has. I thought that the other "firsts" -- our first birthdays without him, the first Christmas -- would be harder to deal with, but I don't think it's been this hard for me since the first weeks after Dad's death. I've been having stomach pains on and off for several days now, and my energy levels have been fluctuating like crazy. (Ironically, this is happening at a time when I've gone through a lot of good personal growth, and I have a social life again for the first time in nearly four years.) All of us who remain have been crying more than usual lately, and the memories of that Saturday a year ago are becoming more vivid for all of us. I'm hoping that these feelings become easier to deal with once we get past Monday, but I know that getting to Tuesday isn't going to be a "magic bullet" that makes everything all better.

It probably doesn't help that we're at that same time of year when Dad died again, and I see that every time I go outside or look out of my bedroom window. We'd had a pretty extended thaw here lately -- it got rid of the huge amount of snow we'd had the month prior, but melted it so fast that several rivers in Ohio and Michigan have been overflowing -- but now today we're getting a few inches of fresh snow, and I can remember we had a fair bit of snow on the ground when Dad died. Really, though, since the start of the year, I've been waiting for Daylight Savings Time to come. As much as I was a creature of the night in my younger years, I've found myself affected more by Seasonal Affective Disorder these days, and having that extra hour of daylight in the evenings should help me feel a little better. In the meantime, it's grey and snowy outside, and I can only hope that a full day of hockey helps me take my mind off of how quickly we're approaching a year since Dad's death.

Labels: dad, family, weather

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As many commentators have pointed out in the celebration of Lincoln's 200th birthday, as dire as the crises our nation faces now may seem, they are miniscule in comparison to what Lincoln faced in his presidency. The attacks of 09.11 may have brought the horrors of foreign hatred of the United States to our soil, but the Civil War killed about two hundred times as many Americans over a much longer period of time. The war eviscerated this country -- North and South alike -- in a way that none of us could even hope to imagine, and to further punish the Confederate soldiers who had lost so many of their brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, would have been abject cruelty. The Confederacy and Union alike had suffered enough, and the important business of rebuilding the country and assisting the newly-freed slaves needed to be done.

As bad of a drubbing as the Republican party might have taken in the last election, and as unpopular as Bush and Cheney might be right now, there has been no real suffering, either on their part or on the parts of the other people in their adminstration who were responsible for everything from the gutting of civil liberties to lying us into a war that killed thousands more American soldiers. For all their unpopularity, these men and women still have their supporters, particularly in big business, and will be able to lead cushy jobs sitting on the boards of Republican think tanks and companies, and giving speeches, for the rest of their lives. Contrast this to the misery that millions of American families are going through right now in the wake of the global economic crisis, brought about in large part by their mishandling of government and the role it should take in helping to regulate the market to prevent catastrophes like the one we find ourselves in now. Perhaps we should not worry about punishing the Bush/Cheney "soldiers" -- congressional Republicans and the propagandists who advanced the Bush Doctrine on television and the radio -- but for the Bushes and Cheneys and Rumsfelds whose actions led to the deaths of so many Americans, and so many innocent Iraqi and Afghani civilians, for the profit of companies that gave right back to the Republican party, justice must be served. If these men and women have committed crimes, then for the sake of our collective moral conscience as Americans, then we must not give into the Obama rhetoric of "looking forward instead of getting mired in the past," and bring those who have committed criminal acts to justice, so that future leaders of this and other countries will not be tempted to repeat the malfeasance of the previous administration.

I still remember after the invasion of Iraq, when the Weapons of Mass Destruction were not found, and voices began to be raised about the conduct of the invasion, and support for the invasion began its precipitous drop. At a time when Congress should have been investigating the war, its eyes were focused on the Super Bowl halftime show that featured Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction." At a time when our American soldiers were giving their lives in the deserts and streets of Iraq, Congress instead inflated a relatively benign and altogether stupid MTV-influenced visual into a national moral outrage. I don't question that it was great politics -- it played well to their base and helped energize them -- but it was an obvious and nauseating diversion from what was unquestionably more pressing and relevant business for this nation. After the nipple slip wore thin on everyone, instead of turning to the war, we got congressional investigations of steroids in baseball, which served to again divert us from the questions that should have been asked about the invasion of Iraq.

As the first hundred days of the Obama Administration tick away, and little is done to investigate not just the previous adminstration but also the corporate fatcats who were equally (if not more) responsible for crashing our economy, let's look at who is being investigated by the authorities right now. Perhaps the most scrutinized public figure right now is Michael Phelps, as South Carolina police have arrested and questioned several people to try to press charges against Phelps for the bong hit he was photographed taking. Ignoring the futility and stupidity of putting this much effort into trying to nab someone for smoking weed -- I could understand this much effort to punish him for his drunk driving, but trying to put potheads in jail is possibly the biggest waste of law enforcement resources of this generation -- do they really think that they're going to find someone to narc on Michael Phelps? Whoever drops the dime on Phelps is going to have nearly every Hannah Montana fan in the country saving up their allowances to put a hit on him or her. In addition, instead of going against all the corruption on Wall Street, the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating whether or not Apple lied about Steve Jobs' health to try to shore up Apple's stock price. In addition to being wasteful of SEC resources, at a time when we desperately need to root out those people responsible for this economic crisis and get rid of them, I think this is also highly disrespectful of Jobs and his fight to stay healthy. Fans of Jobs and Apple should be on the streets protesting this action, even if the protestors' signs are likely to cost twice as much as other signs, and not work nearly as well, but they'll still get lots of praise for being so ergonomic and pretty.

I realize that President Obama and his administration are not behind either of these diversions, but they're still diversions from what should be the single most important government investigation since Watergate. Just as those of us outside of the political and media mainstream were responsible for getting the media and some brave politicians to finally ask the questions that needed to be asked about Iraq, we must be vigilant in making the mainstream media and politicians of all stripes answer the questions that need to be answered about the conduct of the previous administration and their big business friends, and to bring to justice those who have commmitted crimes. Reconciliation and forgiveness are noble concepts, but for those who have lost their jobs and homes in the economic crisis, and friends and family members in Iraq, justice demands that those who have wronged this country be held accountable for their actions.

Labels: politics

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I'm not sure I quite believe that we are already in the worst financial crisis in my lifetime, but if we aren't there yet, we're damn close to it. At times like this it becomes hard for artists like myself to push for increased arts funding, especially those of us who live in the part of the country getting hammered the most by the collapse of the automobile industry. People in the arts community are used to being undervalued by society at large, from the moments our negative teachers/parents start telling us "there's no money in art" when we show our first serious interests in it, to when we get out in the real world after completing our education and learn that lesson first-hand. Although we may complain about this, though, we try to pursue the arts to the best of our ability because it is, in every sense of the phrase, a labour of love. We're used to the hardships, so when another group that's used to comparatively stable conditions gets hurt, many of us feel that the right thing to do is to rush aid to the other groups first, and hold off on asking for support until a time when our pleas are more likely to be heard.

Right now, however, is no time to be silent on this issue. The Republican assault on the arts began long before I was born, but I was in high school when schools began en masse to eliminate arts classes (music, the visual arts, dance, and so on), and then Newt Gingrich and congressional Republicans began a sustained campaign to bankrupt the National Endowment for the Arts and destroy PBS when I was 18. Under the iron fist of Republican rule of the legislative and executive branches earlier this decade, PBS was forced to carry right-wing propaganda like Journal Editorial Report. George W. Bush was undoubtedly a zeitgeist of the post-Clinton years, as he has been described from people of all persuasions as a profoundly incurious man, the most dominant politician from a political family where, as has been noted so many times, introspection is seen not as a healthy part of rational decision-making, but as a character flaw. Even now, efforts to restore arts programmes in schools are often stillborn, while we artists clench our teeth as the National Football League and its behemoth of a marketing arm flood the airwaves with commercials to stop physical education programmes from meeting the same fate. This is the absolute worst time for the arts community to have our needs stymied by Democrats in Congress and the White House, no matter how well-aware we were that their promises of handling things differently were no more than the usual Democratic lip service to progressives and liberals.

That funding for the arts would be verboten in the stimulus bills is, by itself, hardly newsworthy, and not entirely unexpected. However, to call funding for the arts "wasteful" and "non-stimulative," and to lump in it with gambling establishments, is a profound insult to the arts community. The financial merits of a strong arts community have been debated for generations, and I doubt any arguments I might make will swing popular opinion on the subject in one direction or another. However, when we, as a community, are so deeply insulted and belittled, particularly by those who pledged to make things better than they were for the previous eight years, we must respond. President Obama may have removed his campaign platforms from his Website, but his campaign pledges to resuscitate the arts community are archived forever. More than ever before, the arts community must speak up, to politicians in Washington and to the American people, and stand up for the good things we do for this country, and the resources we need to keep doing those good things. We cannot afford to remain silent when we are so insulted and denigrated. If we do not speak up now, when we are already so enfeebled from the last decades' assaults on the arts, will we ever have the opportunity to speak up again?

Labels: arts, politics

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However, several months ago I began to have ex-classmates from the private school I went to start to friend me on there, which put me in a bit of a dilemma. I have said repeatedly that I believe that school messed me up in more ways than I can count, and I still feel that way; a visit back there in 2002 for a University of Toledo commitment (on a Saturday, so I didn't see any old teachers or anything like that) was very troubling for me. The treatment I received there, from administrators, teachers, and students alike, was beyond intolerable, and I honestly believe that everyone there knew that they could get away with treating me like crap because my parents weren't as rich as the other parents, so we couldn't outlast them in a lawsuit. The wounds from back then have dulled in pain, but I doubt they will ever fully heal. Thus, hearing from so many of my old classmates from back then was not exactly comforting to me at first.

That being said, the classmates who have gotten in touch with me were not people who treated me poorly, at least not once we got to high school. They scorned me at times in high school, but, well, it was usually because I was acting like an idiot, so I deserved it. We haven't really messaged each other beyond the friend requests, but I wouldn't be opposed to talking with them over the Internet. Face-to-face encounters might be too awkward for me at this point -- I'm never going to any reunions -- but I guess that maybe now that all these years have passed (more than I care to think about), I'm finally able to put things in context, and I can do a better job of separating my feelings about the school and my time there from my feelings about them. I'm not going to make the first move to initiate conversations with any of them, but I guess now I'm not as opposed to talking with them as I once was. (Maybe one of them can get in touch with the school and tell them to stop sending me snail-mail addressed to "Mr. Sean Shannon." Better yet, maybe they can get the school to stop sending me mail, period.)

There is one thing that bothers me, though. I did a lot of really dumb things when I was there, albeit things that people my age tended to do. (At that school, though, you were never supposed to act like a kid, even when, you know, you were a kid.) Those of you who remember my Internet experiences pre-.org know that I did a lot of stupid things back then, and even in the .org days I've still managed to act like an idiot at times. I like to think that I've learned how to act better, but there are times when I wonder about that. Sometimes I think that maybe I am still the same idiot I was back then, and I've just learned to hide my mistakes better. Even if my old mistakes have been forgotten by the people I knew back then, or if those people have the decency not to bring them up, I still worry that if I ever meet up with them, I'll just make some new mistakes and things will go back to the way they were for me in my hardest years at that school. I've gotten past the point where I'll care that much about what they think of me, but if I do something like that, then I'll feel like it will be confirmation that I really haven't changed in the years that have passed, and that I'm still the same idiot I once was. That's why I'm probably going to remain passive about contacting them, at least for now.

Labels: internet, personal, toledo

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