What drugs is Sarah Palin on?

Could you imagine if you or I quit mid-school or mid-contract on an agreement, something we had signed on to do after full disclosure?  We would be viewed as unreliable in our industry and never hired again.  I guess I just don't get the Palin mystique if one exists.  Yes she is attractive, but so what.  She is not articulate, she has no new ideas, she is not well-versed in the issues at hand, she is in my mind George W. in a skirt.    She has no self-awareness, no insight, portrays herself as a victim rather than the volunteer that she is.  She volunteers for all of the media scrutiny of her acts and omissions as well as of her family life.  During the campaign I kept thinking what the media would have said had the Obama's teenage daughter become pregnant and he greeted the baby-daddy at the airport and brought him up on stage!  What if Obama had attending five colleges in six years before graduating from a mediocre school?  

Let's get real - why do we as Americans want mediocrity in our President?  Why do we accept it?  Shouldn't our country be run by the best and the brightest?  Rather than by a bunch of hypocrites - the ones who preach abstinence without educating their children about birth control, who preach about the sanctity of marriage but have affairs,  the ones who decry that we are judging them, but in fact judge us for our decisions because they are different?  Who judge those of other religions or denominations rather than accept them?  

Toleration - I have heard that word so much the last few years.  How we must tolerate others different than ourselves but I think it is dead wrong.  Toleration implies that we can continue to dislike someone whose views or acts are different then ours, but on the surface.  We don't have to like them, just tolerate them.  We don't have to have them in our homes or our houses of worship, just tolerate them, placate them.  But that misses the point. We need to accept others as they are, live and let live - isn't that what it really means to accept someone for who they are?  

I watch the media circus surrounding this bizarre woman and think that she is no different from Britney Spears except Britney has some talent.   

Musings on life and death

As an undergraduate student at Brandeis I studies my favorite poet, Emily Dickinson, and her obsession with death and dying.  She was rather morbid, but interesting.  I find myself thinking more about death now that I am middle-aged and watching my father's illness and decline.  And now, the deaths of public icons, plane crashes, car accidents, it is just all so random.  Life has become so random and violent and unpredictable.  It is no longer easy the way it was for some gentry in the old days to retreat into some inner world and not really interact in any external way, there was no internet and 24 hour news cycle screaming news and information at them.  Life was much slower, with time to contemplate the world, experience it, live it or choose not to live it, but there was time.  Now we listen to music while the tv is on, while we text and email and surf, and get nothing done, and think no great thoughts, experience little, just watch the world go by and watch those who have accomplished greatness depart.