Running for Your Life: Wanted: New Ideas

It's First Tuesday (Jan. 24) for President Trump -- and the news wires and social media are thrumming with stories about, well, just how the new president is set on doing everything the campaigning candidate said he was going to do.

For the most part, you've got to be impressed so far with the response of the media, which didn't exactly win friends with the way in which it influenced people during the US Election 2016. As in, never in modern US history have so many mainstream news names endorsed a single person for president: and no, it wasn't Donald Trump.

So, when it comes to the dissenters, we need fresh voices. (I'm looking at you Bill Maher, whose MAKE AMERICA SANE AGAIN slogan is as fresh as bin lettuce.)

Like the current Village Voice. Two must-read pieces appeared in the most recent Voice, one by Joy Connolly that likens the prospects for the current presidency to the last days of the Roman republic http://bit.ly/2jWjeIp and the second by the novelist and intellectual Aleksandar Hemon http://bit.ly/2jZCDc3.

The theme? Wanted: New Ideas. It's going to be a helluva ride, and we need new ideas and fresh approaches to dissent to keep it real.

Next: Running for Your Life: Race Ahead

Running for Your Life: Fraught Friday

For those of you who think Friday is Ground Zero in the count of America Lost, consider this article entitled “The Wrecking Crew” by Thomas Frank in Harper’s Magazine. http://bit.ly/2k56ZKv.

Publication date: August 2008, three months before the two-term Obama administration got its start, on Election Day 2008. 

As my previous post intimated, the barricades loom. But go informed.

Next: Running for Your Life: Wanted: New Ideas

Running for Your Life: Irony Watch – Beyond Coincidence

[Context: Back in street telephone days, the phrase grammar school was synonymous with elementary school.]

While gym running on the treadmill in Park Slope, Brooklyn, on Monday (Jan. 16), I saw through the window a young woman carrying a protest placard. The vibe was similar to a pissed-off looking fella in a beard I’d noticed on the same block a day earlier. He was wearing a “NOT MY PRESIDENT” ball cap.

The NMP protester’s placard-message denounced those who would on Friday (Inauguration Day) proclaim any kind of legitimate hold to “THIER AMERICA.”

Resist, yes. But not in ignorance.

Or maybe I’m missing the point. That the illiterate message is meant to convey the crisis in the country’s single greatest government potential: “grammar” schools.

Next: Running for Your Life: Wanted: New Ideas

Running for Your Life: Rituals

“The Path,” a book of introduction to Chinese philosophy, has an interesting approach to how we can subtly alter our relationship to happiness.

Consider the observation: “I’m sorry, but that’s not the way I am, I can’t [do, feel good about] that.”

Normally we think of this aspect of our personality in a clear-cut way, ie, a moral regard for those less fortunate than us, say, or more trivially, favoring dogs over cats, not taking sugar in your coffee.

Change, though, as “The Path” asserts infects from the small cuts.

A man barges ahead of you at the open doorway of a subway car from which you are preparing to leave. Courtesy has it that those quitting a public space should be afforded the room to exit before the person accepts the privilege of riding.

What is your response? Judgment and anger at the social code breaker? Or a smile and a shrug? How does this ritual play out within you? An added stressor to your workday commute? Or as something that you concede as simply beyond your control?

When it comes to wee rituals, that moment of judgment is key. “The Path” would have us be aware of the judgment and where it takes you. Maybe the next time your judgment is equally harsh, but you stop short of anger. In that way, your daily rituals alter. Bit by bit.

I am on a four-mile run [on Jan. 12] when I overhear a woman say, and “those other apartments, they will be geared to lower incomes.”

I admit my first response to hearing that was to reflect on my superiority to those with “lower incomes.” Instead, of just neutrally absorbing the information. Change happens in the smallest cuts. 

Teachers, as I wrote about last post, in New York City are those of lower incomes, as are beloved nannies, retired people on fixed incomes.

Mental spaces are places of daily ritual – it is not a phrase restricted to teeth-brushing, and dog-walking, etc. Or so says, “The Path.” That the way you are is, believe it or not, subject to change.

Next: Running for Your Life: Wanted: New Ideas

Running for Your Life: Irony Watch – Beyond Coincidence

Seen on bus panel advertising:

Handsome, well-dressed man in the New York City subway.

Message: One-Year MBA for, uh, MERCY College

Slogan: For Those With a Passion to Get Ahead

Context: Life can be most richly lived in the briefest of moments.

One of my most gratifying conversations over the holidays occurred in my daughter’s bar and grill in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn.

As M and I were leaving on New Year’s Eve, I met K, a teacher. I proceeded to tell K how back in my hometown of Owen Sound, Ontario, the people who were the pillars of the community if not the local heroes were invariably teachers. I had not talked to many public school teachers during the holidays – so I took the opportunity of telling her how much I valued her profession. She smiled, thanked me and wished me a Happy New Year.

Happiness, of course, is in the eye of the beholder.

Next: Running for Your Life: Rituals!