ThomStratton.com

I recently reconnected with an old friend, who invited me to join an online forum exploring passion–as in the things that really drive us. In order to apply I had to answer a question about my personal passions. Fortunately my friend added me to the group before I could answer, but it’s got me thinking. Just what is passion? What elevates it above mere interest, for example?

I’ve recently become a fan of Formula 1 racing. Nine months ago I knew next to nothing about the sport and, if asked, would probably have told you it would be boring to watch a bunch of guys in little cars drive around and around for an hour and a half. Unless there are wrecks, I suppose. Now I know a lot more about the sport to the point that I could likely converse at length about different teams, their strengths and weaknesses, the drivers, the races I’ve seen, the race tracks, and what’s good and bad about the sport. I can usually be found in front of the TV every race weekend to watch Saturday qualifying, and at some point in the next few days I’ll find time to watch Sunday’s race.

But am I passionate about Formula 1? I don’t know. I…wouldn’t classify my interest that way. And that’s my problem, perhaps? I don’t know that I’m passionate about anything, really. Dictionary.com defines “passion” as “any powerful or compelling emotion or feeling, as love or hate.” As a a culture we tend to get superlative with our use of words. We claim to “love” a lot of things that we probably shouldn’t describe that way. I like Formula 1. I enjoy Formula 1. I’m dedicated to exploring it further. But do I love it? Am I passionate about it?

My wife would likely claim I get passionate about certain topics, as measured by how loud I get when talking about them. Perhaps that counts, then. But most of the time when called out on it I’m perfectly fine with changing the topic. And, frankly, I could see myself being bored with Formula 1 within a year or two and not watching it any more, especially when my son who introduced me to it leaves home. That doesn’t sound like passion to me.

So just what is passion, and how do you know when you have it? What do you think? Drop me a comment below.

David Yager, president of University of the Arts, had this to say in response to demands that Camille Paglia, who is on the staff there, be fired or de-platformed for views that disagree with those of the plaintiffs:

Unfortunately, as a society we are living in a time of sharp divisions—of opinions, perspectives and beliefs—and that has led to decreased civility, increased anger and a “new normal” of offense given and taken. Across our nation it is all too common that opinions expressed that differ from another’s—especially those that are controversial—can spark passion and even outrage, often resulting in calls to suppress that speech.
That simply cannot be allowed to happen. I firmly believe that limiting the range of voices in society erodes our democracy. Universities, moreover, are at the heart of the revolutionary notion of free expression: promoting the free exchange of ideas is part of the core reason for their existence. That open interchange of opinions and beliefs includes all members of the UArts community: faculty, students and staff, in and out of the classroom. We are dedicated to fostering a climate conducive to respectful intellectual debate that empowers and equips our students to meet the challenges they will face in their futures.
I believe this resolve holds even greater importance at an art school. Artists over the centuries have suffered censorship, and even persecution, for the expression of their beliefs through their work. My answer is simple: not now, not at UArts.
The University of the Arts is committed to the exercise of free speech and academic freedom, to addressing difficult or controversial issues and ideas through civil discussion, with respect for those who hold opinions different from our own. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’ 1927 advice still holds true today: that the remedy for messages we disagree with or dislike is more speech and not enforced silence.

It’s nice to know that someone still values free speech and intellectual challenge. Would that more were like this.

Just a little musical snack for your Friday afternoon…

My father worked several jobs at a time to provide for our family. One of those jobs was fixing and maintaining sewing machines out of our home. Since our house was clearly visible from one of the busiest roads in town, he had a local artist paint a sign for the side of our house announcing “Sewing Machine Repair.”

It turned out to be a magical sign. The wording changed constantly! “But it says so right on your sign!” people would insist when they’d stop in and we’d inform them that no, our dad did not fix lawn mowers, refrigerators, dishwashers, or the numerous other things they wanted him to fix. They had a need, and the sign would magically change in an attempt to meet that need.

I guess I needed it to say “Sewing Machine Repair”, because I never once saw it say anything else.

As I often tell my kids, you find what you’re looking for. If you’re looking for examples of human depravity, you’ll find it. If you’re looking for examples of human goodness, you’ll find it. You’ll subjectively interpret what you see as much as possible in order to see what you want to see. It’s normal. We all do it.

Knowing that, we should also all be careful to rush to judgment. Are we trusting reliable sources? Do we have access to all the facts? Are we imposing our own desires on the situation? Could it be we’re only seeing what we want to see?

It seems lately a lot of us want to see people behaving badly. We want our own biases toward what ever side we feel opposes our own to be confirmed. And looking at what we want confirmed, I have to admit I’m pretty scared of what we’re becoming. We want teenage boys to be racist jerks. We want a powerful new member of our ruling body to be an incompetent idiot. We want the most powerful man in the world to be a foolish, racist warmonger collaborating with our primary geopolitical enemy. We want our enemies to be worthy and deserving of horrible deaths, rapes, or numerous other tortures.

I don’t want us to be that way. I’d rather not see us that way. I still would like to think we are better than this.

I recently ran across a video of Sting performing a concert of winter-oriented music. Included in the concert was his setting of a Robert Louis Stevenson poem “Christmas at Sea”, which tells the tale of a sailor on a ship fighting not to run aground in a winter storm. The ship is perilously close to a cliff on which sits a town, and he realizes it’s Christmas day, and that village is where he was born.

Sting is the consummate storyteller, and he leaves the story before Stevenson ended it to preserve the tone he sets. But I had to go and find the original text, and though it ends more happily for the ship, I find the ending still poignant and haunting.

Christmas at Sea

The sheets were frozen hard, and they cut the naked hand;
The decks were like a slide, where a seaman scarce could stand;
The wind was a nor’wester, blowing squally off the sea;
And cliffs and spouting breakers were the only things a-lee.

They heard the surf a-roaring before the break of day;
But ’twas only with the peep of light we saw how ill we lay.
We tumbled every hand on deck instanter, with a shout,
And we gave her the maintops’l, and stood by to go about.

All day we tacked and tacked between the South Head and the North;
All day we hauled the frozen sheets, and got no further forth;
All day as cold as charity, in bitter pain and dread,
For very life and nature we tacked from head to head.

We gave the South a wider berth, for there the tide race roared;
But every tack we made we brought the North Head close aboard:
So’s we saw the cliffs and houses, and the breakers running high,
And the coastguard in his garden, with his glass against his eye.

The frost was on the village roofs as white as ocean foam;
The good red fires were burning bright in every ‘long-shore home;
The windows sparkled clear, and the chimneys volleyed out;
And I vow we sniffed the victuals as the vessel went about.

The bells upon the church were rung with a mighty jovial cheer;
For it’s just that I should tell you how (of all days in the year)
This day of our adversity was blessèd Christmas morn,
And the house above the coastguard’s was the house where I was born.

O well I saw the pleasant room, the pleasant faces there,
My mother’s silver spectacles, my father’s silver hair;
And well I saw the firelight, like a flight of homely elves,
Go dancing round the china plates that stand upon the shelves.

And well I knew the talk they had, the talk that was of me,
Of the shadow on the household and the son that went to sea;
And O the wicked fool I seemed, in every kind of way,
To be here and hauling frozen ropes on blessèd Christmas Day.

They lit the high sea-light, and the dark began to fall.
‘All hands to loose top gallant sails,’ I heard the captain call.
‘By the Lord, she’ll never stand it,’ our first mate, Jackson, cried.
… ‘It’s the one way or the other, Mr. Jackson,’ he replied.

She staggered to her bearings, but the sails were new and good,
And the ship smelt up to windward just as though she understood.
As the winter’s day was ending, in the entry of the night,
We cleared the weary headland, and passed below the light.

And they heaved a mighty breath, every soul on board but me,
As they saw her nose again pointing handsome out to sea;
But all that I could think of, in the darkness and the cold,
Was just that I was leaving home and my folks were growing old.

————————-

Here’s Sting’s setting:

**Trigger warning: Religion**

I caught part of a song the other day referencing Adam and Eve and wondering why Eve gets all the blame. Eve does get a pretty bad rap in most Christian culture, but I’m grateful to be in a religion that has a very different outlook. Eve was the first to recognize that she and Adam had been given conflicting charges: Be fruitful and multiply, but don’t eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. They were currently in a state of innocence and had no idea how to comply with the first commandment, and couldn’t without breaking the second.

Eve was wise enough to recognize what truths Satan mixed in with his lies and realized that there had to be opposition for their existence to have any meaning. They would have to know what it was to experience pain and sorrow in order to truly appreciate joy and delight. She realized there could be no reward from obedience unless there was the option and the draw to disobey.

And so it was that Eve was willing to put everything on the line for the chance to have knowledge, to experience the true joy that can only come from knowing true sorrow. She ate the fruit, knowing that it could cost her everything, including Adam, who had already proven himself stubbornly unwilling to even consider what was at stake. Remember, that it wasn’t until later that they learned that there would be a savior provided to free them from the effects of disobedience.

So while Adam is to be commended for his love of Eve and his final willingness to recognize the wisdom in Eve’s choice, thus ensuring that they could at least keep their first commandment, it is Eve who we owe the greatest thanks for her vision and understanding–and willingness to put it all on the line to resolve the catch-22 they had been given. She made a choice–a choice that broke the endless cycle they were in and, while unleashing on the world mortality and all the suffering that goes with it, gave mankind the gift of choice, to experience both good and evil, and therefore experience sorrow, but also joy.

So, no, not everyone blames Eve–nor should we. In my church’s theology we know Adam to be Michael, the Archangel who led the fight against Satan. It only stands to reason that Eve was also someone incredibly valiant and strong, also forefront in that fight. Because of her choice we all get to experience this earthly life where yes, there is great sorrow, evil, and hardship, but there can also be great joy and beauty and goodness. This life is not the end and sum of our existence, but only a period of learning and testing, much like our school years. Whatever terrible things might happen at that school, our Mother and Father await us at home, ready to kiss away our tears and make it all better. The pains of this life won’t last, but the things we learn here and the joy we experience will.

It was Eve who chose to unlock the doors and declare school in session. I’m glad she made that choice because, though life can certainly be difficult, I welcome the chance to learn, to grow, to experience. It never would have happened without her.

When well-intentioned rules go awry…

It would seem that Facebook, now officially embarrassed by their having been used to influence elections, is now willing to be used to…influence society. Thank you, that’s SO much better. Silicon Valley seems increasingly interested in helping “the right people” decide what we can view.

Meanwhile we have a president calling out and insulting media (but doing nothing more than that–show me one actual policy or law he has instituted to inhibit the press), claiming they are colluding against him–and they respond by coordinating an editorial attack on him.

Meanwhile Twitter is experimenting with attempting to filter misinformation and expose us to alternative points of view. Sounds great, right? But who gets to determine what is misinformation and which alternative points of view to push?

Look, as much as I dislike the nasty sea of alternate truth that is the Internet, the last thing I want is someone else deciding for me what I will or won’t see. We already get enough of that. In fact, that’s a large part of the problem!

A friend of mine recently posted a stirring defense of journalism on her Facebook feed, and I agree with her–to a point. Journalism IS important. It’s critical to a free society. The problem is that so much of what passes for journalism these days is not really journalism. It’s entertainment. It’s opinion. The media increasingly doesn’t trust us to weigh the facts and decide for ourselves–not even “we report, you decide” Fox News does that. Everything must be given a particular spin to make sure we don’t miss the most important details that will ensure we interpret the story correctly.

Not every journalist is guilty, of course. There are many who still believe what they were taught in their beginning journalism courses of unbiased reporting. There are some who will go after the establishment, whoever the establishment may be, whenever something doesn’t add up or someone is abusing their power. Those journalists need our support and appreciation.

But the majority of the talking heads we hear about these days have an agenda, and they let that agenda guide their choices. And that’s how we get reporting about a protest of a few dozen and a counter-protest of a few thousand–one that ended in violence, vandalism, and a a death last year–and the focus is on how there were far more police than the media thought were necessary and seemed to be going out of their way to protect the smaller group from the larger instead of focusing in on the actions of all parties involved. That larger protest group hardly acquitted itself well in the eyes of normal citizens, but most of use never even heard about that part of the story.

Is it any wonder at least one commentator claims that modern journalism is all about deciding the most important stories to cover–with a pillow until they stop breathing?

When we have a media who not only feels they are best qualified to decide what we should and shouldn’t hear about, but how we should feel about what they do cover it’s very hard not to consider them an enemy. Perhaps they’re not the enemy, but they’re certainly not our friend. They are manipulating us as much as any politician. And both media and politicians are pressuring the big tech companies to atone for their big-ness and rich-ness by backing them up on their plans to further ensure we’re only allowed to see what they deem fit.

Never has the term “Nanny State” been so apt. Everyone wants to do our thinking for us.