When the Going Gets Tough
There’s an old saying: When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping. I think it may be from the Torrah. At any rate, it wasn’t from anyone who’s been Christmas shopping recently.
Waiting in line yesterday at the Best Buy a woman burst into the store. She apparently had bought a stove with the promise it would get installed by Saturday. Since it was Sunday, and she still had no stove, I gathered Best Buy had let her down. So, she was understandably upset. She ranted for a while at the top of her lungs, and everyone tried to ignore her, but it was no small feat.
I’m saying this to introduce a painful subject, the story about how House and Senate Intelligence knew about our government torturing prisoners, but kept quiet about it. This is from people who should have known better. At the highest elected level in our government. Obviously, I expect nothing from Bush, Cheney, or anyone on their staffs. But, I do expect better from Pelosi, Rockefeller, Harman, etc. The going that got tough in this case, was my understanding of the nature and ethics of our political leaders.
What do you do when the going gets tough? Going shopping just doesn’t seem like the answer in this case. Not in the two weeks before Christmas, anyway.
I go skateboarding. Maybe that’s how Lloyd Kahn got into it:
Above is Lloyd Kahn with his skateboard. If you don’t recognize the name, Kahn popularized the use of geodesics in home-building, particularly in the Whole Earth Catalog. His work came up last night on Tom Brokaw’s show on 1968. The show reminded me about reading an article about how he had taken up skateboarding (actually, longboarding) at age 65.
While I’m younger than 65, I’m no spring chicken. So, stories like Kahn’s inspire me. His life appears to be of the sort that Thoreau once wrote: Why are we in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music that hears, however measured, or far away.
You can find Lloyd Kahn’s blog here.
