"Lord in your mercy..."

It’s been about a year since I have posted anything to this site. I must admit that I have been preoccupied with the shifts and focuses that my life has taken with regards to work and family. In just a few weeks I will celebrate my fiftieth trip around the sun and for me that concept is not something that I am prepared to deal with.

Being born a bicentennial baby has given me a unique perspective on the reality of where this world has been and where it might be headed and from my point of view the future is not as bright as the commencement speakers at my high-school graduation and college graduation speakers told us it would be. I remember that the sentiments that were expressed when I graduated college in 1998, were that the year 2000 would mark a pivotal moment for our generation to leave our mark on an ‘unmarred world with a fresh view of what might be possible.’ The idea that dreamers could change the world was repeated to us time and again and that Technology and the Internet Superhighway that was coming would change everything.

They were right about technology and the Internet, but this world that was to be a fresh canvas, unmarred and for us to write well…that just didn’t happen.

Since the first European settlers that came to North America and committed genocide of the Native people and the enslavement of African Americans—we have built a nation on the destruction of humanity—fought wars cloaked in this idea of freedom and repeated the cycle as if it were a washing machine. We have learned nothing.

We have not learned that all human life is sacred and made in the divine image of God. We have oppressed anyone that stood in our way and under the guise of spreading democracy and forcing nations to become constitutional republics and follow in our footsteps of domination and greed; What we have accomplished is th continued loss of human life: both soldier and innocent women and children.

The crisis that we face today is fear of one another and the unknown. It is the selfishness and greed of a consumer driven economy that reminds us at every turn we need more. I would argue we need less. Less information—and connection to twenty-four-hour news cycles and information that spreads around the globe in milliseconds. I would argue that instead of having overnight delivery from an online retailer we might go into a brick-and-mortar store and engage with the people that serve us. That somehow, we bring ourselves to stand in line even if there is only one check-out line available and make small talk with the person next to us; and when we have paid our bill and received our goods—we say a genuine thank you to the clerk that has helped us.

As I have aged Doctors appointments have become more regular for me and that in my opinion is not always a good thing. As I waited for the elevator there was a woman who was older than me and I struck up a conversation. I began to tell her about the days when I would go to Jenns Department store on Mainstreet in Niagara Falls and there was an operator in the elevator and a gate that had to be closed before the elevator could be moved. I shared how my grandmother would go to the back of the fourth floor and pay $50.00 on her charge card and then buy some more clothes for me. I reminisced about the days of the old charge plate machines and the triple copies of receipts and carbon paper and how she would always make sure that she put the carbon paper in her purse. We began to laugh and remember the simpler times.

It was like taking a bath in the waters of a world gone by and somehow, I felt like a nostalgic fool. As we both got off the elevator we smiled. I introduced myself and learned that her name was Janice. We parted ways and she went to her doctor’s office and I went to mine.

There was no discussion of politics, war, hatred, fear, or strife. There was just a moment in time when the only thing that mattered was common memories of a different era that no longer exists. It was the best part of my day.

The whole world feared Y2K and that somehow the world would end due to computer errors from something to do with how the dates were programmed? People would withdraw their life savings from banks and stock up on food enough for their families to live on for years and then it happened January 1, 2000, and nothing changed. The world was still spinning madly on.

September 11^th, 2001, would usher in a world of fear. It would plunge us into two different wars without end and as technology grew faster and communication moved at the speed of light, we forgot that all of us are imperfectly human. We forgot that civility somehow mattered and that the hate we see and experience today should have been left behind in the last century.

I remember being on a church bicycling trip and seeing the first iPhone that one of the other participants had stood inline for over twelve hours at Apple's New York City Store to purchase. At the time my cell phone was a LG silver flip phone. The most it could do was make calls and the occasional text message that took almost an hour to write. I saw the large screen and for the first time with bright beautiful pictures. I touched the screen in which something called an 'icon' would open would open to an ‘app.’ I was beyond impressed. I thought what an incredible invention.

When the iPad hit the market, I was cautious and waited; I finally bought an iPad 2 with the justification I would use it for work but really was just an electronic toy.

Before the iPad was the palm pilot, the blackberry NEXTEL’s direct connect phones and all this other crap that mad life too accessible. This week I finished writing my first novel and sent it off to a publisher. As I had conversation with a friend, I told her how good it felt sending a hard copy in a binder from FedEx. She asked me, “Why would you do that when you could have just sent it electronically?” My response was, “it’s the same reason that Tom Hanks has one of the most extensive collections of vintage typewriters.”

When you have poured you hear into writing a fictional novel for months on end; it just seemed anti-climatic to hit the send button on an e-mail. She reminded me that I am just another ‘old curmudgeon and set in my ways,’ ironically, she will be fifty this year too. Her sentiments may be true—however there was something about that moment was pure almost virginal about looking the counter clerk at FedEx in the eyes and letting her know that the only hazardous thing in the binder was perhaps my poor syntax, grammar and plot themes. Even if she wasn’t amused, she still smiled.

I said to my wife the other day and it’s not the first time she has heard this, “I just don’t understand this world we are living in…twenty-six years and we have learned nothing.” It occurred me afterward that this year we will celebrate two hundred fifty years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It causes me to wonder will we make it another two hundred fifty years?

There was a philosopher that I remember reading in college—I couldn’t tell you their name to save my life, but the sentiment that was expressed was this: “We kill one another because it’s the only thing we know to do and do well...” Throughout the ancient and modern world, we have proven that statement to be true.

In my short time in this world when I have fewer days in front of me than behind—somehow I ardently pray a prayer that was taught to me years ago by a Greek Orthodox Monk as I made candles with him in a small building with vats of hot wax, “Lord, have mercy on me a sinner.” I have now amended that prayer to, “Lord have mercy on us for we know not what we do.”