THE FACE OF OCCUPY NEW HAMPSHIRE

Occupy New Hampshire

Every now and then, as Kathy Thorndike stood on the curb near the park where the Occupy The New Hampshire Primary encampment is located, and as she waved her signs demanding that big money be excised from our politics, a car would drive by and someone would blow their horn and a sleek young voice would tell her to get a job.

As it happens, Kathy Thorndike has a job. She's a health-care administrator overseeing a geriatric care unit near her home in the lakes region around Laconia. As it happens, her husband has a job, too. He's a contractor who built his business after starting out as a laborer and then becoming a carpenter. As it happens, her parents had jobs, too. Her father was a podiatrist, her mother a nurse. As it happens, her children have jobs, too. Two of them are nurses. One of them is a contractor. As it happens, one of her daughters is underwater on her mortgage. Another one of her children has to work overtime at two jobs in order to provide for Kathy's grandchildren. The notion that Occupy is made up of unemployable layabouts is one of the things that makes Kathy Thorndike as angry as an otherwise mild person can get. The other is what she calls the "propaganda" that Occupy has no coherent message. Her message, she says, is the facts of her own life.

"People are really struggling in the middle class," she said here on Saturday afternoon, as a man in a long red robe carrying a sign saying "Fight American Imperialism" rang a cowbell not two feet down the sidewalk. "I was raised in the middle class. I raised my children in the middle class. My children are not middle class. They're all professionals — they're nurses and carpenters — but they're not able to be middle class anymore.

"I got to stay home with my children, and we were middle class, and my husband was a laborer, for goodness sake."

What an amazing change in a generation. Nurses and carpenters are no longer assured of a place in the middle class. I'm reminded of my friend who was laid off his job in computer technology at age 62 and has not found a job three years later. He and his wife may yet lose their home. Companies are not falling over each other to hire folks in their late 50s and early 60s, even highly-skilled people with excellent references and experience. Many of the 'layabouts' are just such people as my friend.

Read more by Charles Pierce at Esquire's The Politics Blog.

I HAVEN'T DONE IT EITHER :-(

Click on the cartoon for the larger view.

From ASBO Jesus.

STORY OF THE DAY - HOSPITALITY SMILE

not sure whether to smile too much
because someone might put them on the
hospitality committee

From StoryPeople.

LOUISIANA MAN - FOR THE SAINTS

Dave Edmunds is a Welshman, but he does a damned good job with Doug Kershaw's 'Louisiana Man'.

H/T to Adrastos at First Draft.

WHEN THE SAINTS GO MARCHING IN: SAINTS - 45 TO LIONS - 28

The Saints did it again! Who dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints? Who dat?

Update from Susan Russell on Facebook:

So the Saints beat the Lions. Is that payback for that Coliseum unpleasantness back in the day?

Good one, Susan!

A COUNTRY TALE

A clergyman was walking down a country lane one warm summer day and encountered a young farmer struggling to load hay back onto a cart after it had fallen off.

"You look hot, my son," said the parson. "Why don't you rest a moment, and then I'll give you a hand."

"No, thanks," said the young man, continuing to work away. "My father wouldn't like it."

"Don't be silly," the minister said. "Everyone is entitled to a break. Come have a drink of water."

Again the young man protested that his father would be upset. Losing his patience, the clergyman said, "Your father must be a real slave driver. Tell me where I can find him and I'll give him a piece of my mind!"

"Well," replied the young farmer, "right now he's under this load of hay."


Regards,

Paul (A.)

This one really ticked my funnybone. I'm guessing Paul (A.) didn't sign off with his usual, 'Cheers', because he knew the joke would cheer me.

CARDINAL FRANCIS GEORGE APOLOGIZES (SORT OF)

From the Chicago Tribune:

Chicago's Cardinal Francis George apologized Friday for remarks aired on Christmas Day comparing the gay pride parade to the Ku Klux Klan.

"I am truly sorry for the hurt my remarks have caused," George said in an interview with the Tribune. "Particularly because we all have friends or family members who are gay and lesbian. This has evidently wounded a good number of people. I have family members myself who are gay and lesbian, so it's part of our lives. So I'm sorry for the hurt."

But is the cardinal sorry for his words?

"When I was talking, I was speaking out of fear that I have for the church's liberty and I was reaching for an analogy which was very inappropriate, for which I'm sorry," George said. "I didn't realize the impact of what I was saying. ... Sometimes fear is a bad motivation."

Come now, Cardinal George, fear for the liberty of your church? Visit the Middle East, where, in certain countries, Christians are being killed for the faith, and perhaps you'll gain a bit of perspective about the threat to your church in the US.

George said he didn't expect the public uproar over the comments.

Well, now he knows.

Photo from Wikipedia.

UPDATE: Oops, I forgot. H/T to Ann Fontaine at The Lead.

A NEW IDEA TO INCREASE CHURCH MEMBERSHIP

Video from WNEM-TV.

From Salon:

A Michigan pastor who says he’s doing everything he can to reach out to people who don’t feel comfortable at a traditional house of worship has opened a tattoo parlor inside his church.

Rev. Steve Bentley of The Bridge, a church located inside a Flint Township shopping center, said his ministry is built on the belief that mainstream religion has become ineffective and irrelevant to most people. To that end, he opened Serenity Tattoo.

Tattoo artists Ryan Brown and Drew Blaisdell work by appointment or from noon until 8 p.m., Monday-Saturday, at the county-licensed tattoo shop that sits not far from Bentley’s office as well as the watering trough that he uses for baptisms.

Bentley, who has two tattoos, said he understands some don’t like the idea of Serenity Tattoo inside the church, but the pastor considers tattooing a “morally neutral” practice that he likens to getting one’s ears pierced.

“We are about doing church in a different way and being relevant to people,” Bentley told The Flint Journal. “You can get a tattoo in a clean environment. You can do it while still sticking to your moral code.”

Somehow, I don't think a suggestion for a tattoo parlor in the church or the parish hall would gain traction at my church or any Episcopal church that I know of, although there may be churches out there who would be willing to implement the idea.

On the church website, Pastor Steven Bentley's says:

Wow!!! Front page article about The Bridge having a Tattoo Parlor in our building has turned into quite the media frenzy. Few things about this - We did not open Serenity Tattoo for publicity, rather to change lives beginning with the artists, their clients and apprentices and spreading from there. Many positive posts from all walks of life - love to see some "getting it." Some negative posts that fall into 3 categories - 1 being Leviticus 19:28 which says not to cut yourselves or make permanent marks - 2 being Jesus clearing the temple in Matthew and 3 being the church is a place for worship not tattoos or other stuff.

The first one is really simple - Lev 19:27 also says to not cut the hair at your temples or trim your beards and that chapter contains many cultural/ceremonial prohibitions based on what the local idolaters were doing and trying to make sure the Israelites were distinguishing themselves from them. Anyone that wants to say that one verse is a prohibition on tattoos must also condemn ear piercing, shaving, and many other currently acceptable practices. Using that verse to condemn tattooing is pure ignorance of good bible study.

Pastor Bentley is spot on about the passage in Leviticus. The book is chock full of laws that both Jews and Christians consider cultural norms for the times, rather than laws to be obeyed today.

Read the rest of Pastor Bentley's statement, which also addresses objections to the tattoo parlor based on passages in the Christian Testament, the cleansing of the temple and the church as a house of worship. His defenses are not all that persuasive to me. In all honesty, I found the toll booths in York Minster to be offensive. I question charging a fee to visit a church. It's fine to suggest an amount for a donation, but to charge an admission fee seems wrong. No one should be kept out of a church because of an inability or even an unwillingness to pay.

I wonder if the experience of getting tattooed is serene at Serenity Tattoo. I was rather tense while getting tattooed several years ago, and I wanted the session to be over as quickly as possible.

T S ELIOT READS 'JOURNEY OF THE MAGI'

A rare recording taken from a live interview T. S. Eliot did for the BBC, broadcast during World War II. The original audio was pretty bad, but I cleaned it up as best I could. The thing that comes through most clearly is that nobody reads Eliot like Eliot.

Uploaded to YouTube by bobtoomey on Sep 15, 2009

The Journey of the Magi

'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

What a treasure! Thanks to Bob Toomey for the find and the fix.

Thanks to Katie Sherrod via Ann Fontaine on Facebook.

OH DEAR!