Fingerpointing

** The following is an edited version of my original post. It was brought to my attention that my choice of language was not the best, and because I feel like I have a point to get across, I'll refrain from using angry expletives. **

It's been 17 days since The Bridge, and the fingerpointing has begun.

This talking head said this. And this person in charge did that. Well, this other guy whose job it was didn't do it well enough. This whole system lacks the income it needs to sufficiently run itself. Well, those elected officials signed a no-new-taxes pledge, so they didn't raise the gas tax 5c, so they took millions out of the road-and-bridge fund, so it's THEIR fault, those small-government, penny-pinching, near-sighted buttholes.

WHO PUT THESE PEOPLE IN POWER OVER US, ANYWAY?!

Oh, wait. That was us.

Remember when that dapper dude with the perfect teeth got up and invoked the name of Jesus and lowering taxes in the same breath? Dang, did he sound good! The Lord doesn't want money in the pockets of no money-grubbin' government. The Lord wants money in OUR pockets, for we're Americans, and the Lord has BLESSED us with a good income with which we're to be good stewards. He's got my vote.

Or, remember when that other person told us that as Americans, we're to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and make it happen ourselves? We don't need a big bureaucracy to tell us what to do or help us live our lives- God meant for us to be a FREE people, FREE to make our own life decisions and FREE of Big Brother looking over our shoulder. That's just like what daddy used to tell me. They've got my vote.

Well, folks. It's not that all these power figures and decision-makers that we've voted into office are bad people, have bad ideas or are even bad policymakers. Maybe they didn't think things through entirely, but then again, neither do we. Why should we expect anything more out of our government than we expect out of ourselves? It's not their fault. It's ours. They're all great at one thing:

SPEAKING OUR LANGUAGE.

We hate taxes. We hate spending money that's not on a movie or a latte. We hate spending money that's not on ourselves. In fact, we love ourselves. And we loathe anything that gets between us and our ability to love ourselves more. And the only thing we loathe more than that is a person with a face telling us or making us do something that gets between us and our ability to love ourselves more. So we latch on to the people with faces who make us feel good about ourselves, who tell us we can keep our money and keep spending it on our lattes and our Cosmopolitan magazines and our new baseball stadiums. Oops, scratch that last one. We didn't have a say in that one, but the feel-good faces said it was okay to tax us for that.

Well, those 100-plus people on the Interstate 35W bridge had a face. The kind of face you see everyday. So does everyone else who drove that highway that day. I drove that highway that day. I have a face. I also have a name. It's Ian, nice to meet you. They had names, too. They had lives. I know, because I saw them with my own eyes. I watched as the ones who were lucky enough to make it off that bridge, and well enough to be out of their hospital beds, limped down the aisle at a memorial service with Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists and Hindus, all of whom were praying for and remembering those who were not lucky enough or well enough to be with us.

But we forget that they're there. In fact, I'll be so bold as to say we don't care that they're there.

If you're going to point fingers, point them at me. I'm lazy, and I don't care about other people. I especially hate spending money on people other than myself, especially if it involves giving money to a gas pump. But after you're done pointing it at me, do yourself a favor- be honest and turn that finger around, point it at yourself. You'd complain about an extra 5c on a gallon of gas, too. Maybe not you specifically, but if I had 5c for every person who I've heard complain about the cost of loving themselves with a cup of coffee I'm serving them, I'd probably have enough money to chip in a few bucks to keep a bridge in decent running shape and keep myself, or you, or maybe even that whiny witch from finding themselves at the bottom of the Mississippi.

"Well, I would NEVER wish for someone to end up at the bottom of the Mississippi!"

Yes you do. You wish it every single day. I know I do. For my complete willingness to love myself and not give you a second thought, I wish for you to end up on the bottom of the Mississippi.

There's a quite simple term for this type of behavior. It's called masturbation. Us Christians are taught that it's bad for us, that it takes the focus off of others and puts it squarely on ourselves, for our own sake, to love ourselves. It's selfish. It's evil. It's sinful. It's also called, in more derogatory terms, "screwing yourself". And we do it everyday, with our money and our time and our resources that we spend on ourselves and not others. We do it over and over, and it feels great. You become so involved with it that basic everyday life stuff goes un-maintained. And then when an everyday something that you took for granted crashes to the bottom of a river, you start to think "I've really screwed myself now."

To myself, and to anyone and everyone who's reading this: we are severely near-sighted. Please start seeing other people and realizing how each of us is dependent upon the other for life itself, because it's time to wake up and realize:

We have really screwed ourselves now. The finger points at you and me.

Minnehaha Recreation

It's summer in Minnesota. It's nasty hot outside, we haven't hardly seen a drop of rain (at least on this side of town) in who knows how long, and we all know how I feel about hot and sunny weather.

Recently my Fossil watch died, so I had to bring it in to a Fossil Store to get the battery replaced. The only Fossil Store we have around here is at the Mall of America. Malls are my least favorite places to be, and so I think I can safely draw the conclusion that the Mall of America is my least favorite place to be in America. To me, they represent everything that's wrong with our system, and the MOA is a stadium-sized altar on which we sacrifice our time, money and sanity to the material gods of our culture. And the most frustrating part is that I am still maddeningly and willingly dependent upon this system. So needless to say a mall on a hot summer day, while the A/C is nice, is not my favorite place to be.

Fortunately, the Twin Cities is a place of balance.

For those of you who don't know Minneapolis, there's about a dozen or so lakes with parkways around them, as well as a six mile stretch through the heart of the city called Minnehaha Parkway, a road that parallels the winding Minnehaha Creek. There's bike trails, arching bridges and enough trees and birds to make you forget that you're in the midst of 3.1 million people and only a few miles from the largest megamall in the U.S. I made my way across Lake Nokomis and turned west onto the parkway, put down the windows, opened the sunroof, and immediately noticed that there was easily a 15 degree temperature difference between the streets and the parkway. The speed limit is 25, and it's single-lane, one-way. Under normal circumstances, this is a driving nightmare for me, because I can't stand 25mph speed limits and want to blow past anyone who actually uses them. But driving on Minnehaha Parkway is the antithesis to my, and probably most of America's, way of life. Soaking in the rural in the midst of the urban, creation in the midst of destruction, the natural and the real in the midst of our synthetically satisfying lives, is a little bit closer to how we were meant to live, and it's a good place to be.

But it shouldn't just be confined to one little narrow strip of green space in a field concrete and pollution. That place where we go should not be separate from the lives we lead. Ask yourself what's real; the daily going to work and the shopping and the gas pumps and the "reality" TV? Or is it the making people smile or the time spent in your garden or at the park or having a beer with friends or simply sitting alone with a cup of coffee staring out the window that makes you feel more alive, more attuned to who you really might be beyond your job title and net worth?

I believe this is the definition of "recreation", to do as the word says, to "re-create", or re-realize what's real and how you were meant to be. We live in an immensely complex world of money, politics, anger, me-first and gimme-gimme, and if we were all constantly engaging in recreation, the world might be in a bit better shape.