How do you pick your hero?

Do you look to see who's on other people's pedestals?

Is celebrity a hero marker?

What about a body to kill for?

Neat lycra costumes?

Is your hero more a taker or a giver?

Does your hero exist only in your imagination?

Can you be your own hero?

Does your hero really want to be on a pedestal?

Does your hero inspire you to action?

Is your hero all entertainment?

Is your hero of mythical proportions?

Love...again

Love walks on a tightrope.

Or maybe it's the safety net below.

Or maybe it's the courage to do the triple somersault from the trapeze above.

Or maybe it's the whole damn circus.

Vigilantes

Right now, at this crucial time, America is sitting on a vastly underused resource. Millions of gun-toting concealed carry vigilantes are at home, in cars, in bars in parks and in churches with their AK47's, rifles and pistols and nothing to use them for. They are chomping at the bit to be useful.

Meanwhile, we have thousands of young children and adults from Central America wanting to enter this country and suck us dry.

My idea is to give each of these hungry vigilantes a free ticket to Mexico and let them notch their belts with the kills of drug lords. Just wipe them out. This would give them intimate time with their guns, make the streets safe for the Hispanics and stop those greedy immigrants from making demands on us.

Win win all around, don't you think?

Creativity and productivity

The American capitalist system requires productivity to work. Productivity assures that the middle and lower classes gain the perception of financial stability while the rich pile up wealth. In a weak economy, the productivity mantra clamps down on the workers with more hours, fewer benefits and less job security. Workers become cogs and automatons simply for the privilege of having a decent job. This is often the consequence even of a college education that is seen as a career path.

Creativity engenders an entirely different set of circumstances. For the creative person, work is its own reward. Creativity assures that the work has value. It makes for rewards from within and not from without. The creative person sees college as an adventure toward full humanness and finds a way to sustain a meaningful work and personal life.

The danger is to not see value in work and to not work hard to work satisfying, to not wake up one day to be a cog.

Once a week

Once a week:

Ask yourself a hard question.

Find the quiet time to renew your friendship with yourself.

Decide what it is that most makes you human.

Love and hate

Why is it so easy to hate, even enduring for centuries, and so hard to love?
Why is it so easy to find a Satan to kill, and so hard to find a stranger to love?
Why do we crucify the Ghandis, MLKings and Dorothy Stangs, while petty tyrants sate themselves in luxury?
Why do we fight so hard to hold on to our ideologies and material wealth, while we so easily give up integrity, responsibility and human decency?
Is this the eternal broken condition of humanity?

Living life

Life is to be lived. But a rich life comes with the accumulation of wisdom and self-awareness. A rich life acknowledges that growth comes from giving, not taking, that the self is bigger when it embraces rather than excludes. The full human being flourishes in a web, not a pod.