Friday evening Marrianna and I met a friend who was passing through Raleigh on his way home from a meeting in Morehead City, NC. I'll use the initial M in place of his name. Marrianna has been friends with M for 42 years, approximately twice as long as she and I have been married. We were in Michigan's Upper Peninsula last year for his 69th birthday, and he returned the visit this past May for my 70th.
We had a very good dinner together, and talked over three hours about our families. I had met M twice, for only a few minutes each time, so we actually have only known each other only since we were at his birthday event last year. As I told him last night, he has become a friend of mine as well as Marrianna's. I like, respect, and enjoy being around this man and wish we say him more often. It was a very, very nice evening, and the food was good too. It was a new restaurant to us, but we will return there.
After we got home last evening and for an hour this morning, I read as much on the internet as I could about the Ft. Hood killings. Friends, let me tell you, the reactions available in comments on otherwise sane, responsible news outlets, Time for instance, is enough to convince me that the God of Abraham, Mohamed, the prophets, Jesus, and the Gospels does not exist. But, that is irrelevant to this blog post. I've completed that series, at least for this time.
I've written this before, but it applies here also. A friend told me years ago that when blacks were able to have their scoundrels, race relations would have become equal and normal. Replace blacks with Muslim and I think blacks will have achieved that level long before Muslims.
What basically is the difference between Timothy McVeigh and Major Hasan? I read garbage saying that Hasan represents all Muslims, even going so far as to say Muslims should be annihilated. That is truly sickening. McVeigh is Christian, or claimed to be and used it as a part of his reasoning. Should all Christianity be assigned blame for Oklahoma City, April 19, 1995? The logic is the same it seems to me. But we are able to separate the religion from the act for McVeigh, but not Hasan. There is something very wrong about that.
Among the truly tragic consequences of this terrible incident is the possibility of it causing a tear in the fabric of the fabric of the military troops who need each other to be secure as they go about doing the job our nation assigns. As several troops said on TV last night, "This isn't supposed to happen. We are a family." Now, at the time when the family needs to draw together, there may be strained relations. That is potentially more dangerous than the shootings.
Words are so often weak when needed to convey strong emotions. Reading the paragraph above, "consequences of this terrible incident" doesn't seem nearly strong enough to convey what actually occurred. A terrible incident is when I discover an error in a quilt that may require hours to correct. A terrible incident is a financial loss in the market. "Terrible incident" doesn't begin to express what has happened at Ft. Hood.
And yet, so many horrific things occur almost daily that words become weak-kneed representations. A bombing here, a shooting and suicide wiping out a family, another multiple shooting in Orlando - it goes on and on. Words never seem adequate. It is, however, at this specific time that words become more important. We need to use words as what they are, symbols. Instead of a bomb, or shooting, we need to use words to extinguish our anguish. I don't know whether it is even possible, but I do know that I had rather see humanity using words than bullets.
On the other side of words, though, is the listener. Most of us can hear, physically we cannot stop ourselves from hearing. How many of us listen? How many of us read and think about the words? Is it possible that the words float through space and there is no one to listen, no readers? Both are useless without the other. Maybe we need to develop better listeners as well as the ability to use words.
Somehow our conversation turned to this blog last evening. We talked about the discipline of writing regularly, and I tried to justify my recent sporadic posts, using the excuse that I had just finished a short series about what I believe, and wasn't ready to begin anything new. I do take the title of the blog seriously, "Thinking Through My Fingers." To me, sitting at the computer and writing is an exercise in thinking. As I grow older, among my fears is that my thinking ability will deteriorate. It is only through reading and writing that I exercise my mind to any level. I hope to renew and strengthen the discipline of writing every day.
