This past weekend, I went to a restaurant, and while paying the bill, I didn't compute the tip right. I don't know why, maybe I was distracted by my lovely girlfriend, who was visiting for the weekend. In any case, I realized my mistake while looking at the receipt. I felt really bad, it was half of what I meant to give. On Monday, on the way home from work, I stopped by the restaurant and gave our waitress the rest of her tip, after explaining briefly what I was doing there. She was so happy that I had come back that she gave me a hug. That was pretty unexpected, but it's a good reminder that tips mean something to people. I'm sure that the fact that I came back meant more, though.

I was telling Anna about it, and she said I did a good thing. "But it would have been better to give her the right tip in the first place," I said. But Anna pointed out, perhaps not. I think Anna's right, and I think that the waitress was happier that I came back than she would have been at just the tip in the first place. Maybe she felt bad last night when she didn't get a good tip after doing a good job.

This was a great experience, which I wanted to share, but it has a deeper message. I'm not saying that it was any great thing on my part to go back; it was on my way home from work and everything, but I did something wrong, I made a small mistake, and I tried to correct it, in a small way. It's not surprising to me, as a Christian, that somehow in some difficult to explain way, it is actually better that I made the mistake and sought to correct it. But I think that this is the nature of sin and forgiveness (or mistakes and setting them right) for everyone, not just Christians... We Christians probably just think about it too much ;)

But let's relate this nice incident to the ugly matter of politics. I read on cnn.com that, "Vice President Dick Cheney today said he was offended by Amnesty International's condemnation of the United States for what it called 'serious human rights violations' at Guantanamo Bay."

He says he was offended. He was, you might say, indignant. Nietzsche might say "No one is such a liar as the indignant man." Amnesty International says, "He doesn't take torture seriously; he doesn't take the Geneva Convention seriously; he doesn't take due process rights seriously; and he doesn't take international law seriously." I would say that he is unrepentant.

Admitting that you were wrong is hard. Asking forgiveness is hard; much much harder than the little task of stopping by the restaurant on my way home from work. Nietzsche's quote is about how an indignant attitude is often the mask of a lie. I believe the Bush administration knows that what it's doing is wrong.

It would be politically very difficult for the Bush administration to confess its mistakes to the world, and to begin to set them right. It should, though. It's the right thing as well as the Christian thing to do. It should be done in order to begin the healing and reconciliation process. If it's not done, I believe that the evil it has caused will continue to grow.

Feel free to send comments here.

If you haven't already, you should definitely read this New York Times article basically about how the Ukrainian intelligence service manipulated events during the protest over the recent election. The amazing part is that they did so in a pro-democracy way. They were on the side of the people, and were probably a decisive force in stopping the army from rolling into Kiev to break up the protests. At one point, the army was actually on its way and was called off.

Read the whole article if you can. It reads like a John Clancy novel.

It kinda makes our politicians' anti-democratic Gerrymandering look pitiful, doesn't it?

A software "bug" grants Bush about 4,000 votes in my own Columbus, Ohio.

The only reason they noticed is that only a few hundred votes were cast in that precinct. That's the only time they ever notice such bugs, since there's no way to do a recount.

Mr. Kerry. You need to demand a recount. Now, and when you can't get one, because these machines don't allow for recounts, you need to sue. We are losing democracy to either incompetent programmers or crooks. We need help. I'm so depressed.

On Sunday morning, I had a few free minutes and was browsing through a (paper) copy of the New York Times Magazine, which had a long article about John Kerry.

I didn't think it was a particularly flattering, or a particularly good article, but there was one thing I liked a lot about it, and that is exactly what George Bush has been attacking. I fear that instead of defending the message and clarifying it, Kerry will instead work to disavow it:

"When I asked Kerry what it would take for Americans to feel safe again, he displayed a much less apocalyptic worldview [than Bush]. 'We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance,' Kerry said. 'As a former law-enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise. It isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life.'"

I loved this quote. It stands in stark contrast to the republican point of view which says that as long as there is any terrorism in the world, we must live in fear, we must give up our civil liberties. Any moment anywhere, some terrorist may strike, and because of this, we must put up with never-ending military conflict, our emails will be read, our organizations will be infiltrated, and our library books will be scrutinized. Forever.

"This analogy struck me as remarkable, if only because it seemed to throw down a big orange marker between Kerry's philosophy and the president's. Kerry, a former prosecutor, was suggesting that the war, if one could call it that, was, if not winnable, then at least controllable. If mobsters could be chased into the back rooms of seedy clubs, then so, too, could terrorists be sent scurrying for their lives into remote caves where they wouldn't harm us. Bush had continually cast himself as the optimist in the race, asserting that he alone saw the liberating potential of American might, and yet his dark vision of unending war suddenly seemed far less hopeful than Kerry's notion that all of this horror -- planes flying into buildings, anxiety about suicide bombers and chemicals in the subway -- could somehow be made to recede until it was barely in our thoughts."

But Bush is fighting back against this vision, one of the most hopeful things I've heard a politician (besides Dennis Kucinich) say for a while now. He says that it's "naive and dangerous", and a republican campaign advisor casts it as a view of fighting terrorism that is like law enforcement, "You wait until such time as there's damage and tragedy that visits your shores and then you investigate it like a law enforcement effort."

No. That's not what he said. He said that terrorism must not forever be the focus of our lives. That it is indeed impossible to get rid of it completely (as Bush himself has said), but that doesn't mean that we must go on living forever in fear, as Bush would have us live.

I hope that the republicans who are backing Bush on this one will come to realize the bleak future he would inflict on us: a life lived in fear.

Ironically, the article also says, "After months of having his every word scrutinized by reporters and mocked by Republicans, Kerry appeared to sense danger in the most mundane of places." referring to the authors' own sense of what it is like to interview Kerry. It was painfully obvious as I was reading it that the author was spewing out pointless commentary about exactly the kinds of things that the media and republicans would latch onto, such as the brand of bottled water Kerry prefers. It was almost a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Comments? email me.

Some more choice quotes for anyone who doesn't get around to reading the article (you should):

...through his BCCI investigation, Kerry did discover that a wide array of international criminals -- Latin American drug lords, Palestinian terrorists, arms dealers -- had one thing in common: they were able to move money around through the same illicit channels. And he worked hard, and with little credit, to shut those channels down.

In 1988, Kerry successfully proposed an amendment that forced the Treasury Department to negotiate so-called Kerry Agreements with foreign countries. Under these agreements, foreign governments had to promise to keep a close watch on their banks for potential money laundering or they risked losing their access to U.S. markets. Other measures Kerry tried to pass throughout the 90's, virtually all of them blocked by Republican senators on the banking committee, would end up, in the wake of 9/11, in the USA Patriot Act; among other things, these measures subject banks to fines or loss of license if they don't take steps to verify the identities of their customers and to avoid being used for money laundering.

[...]

In other words, Kerry was among the first policy makers in Washington to begin mapping out a strategy to combat an entirely new kind of enemy. Americans were conditioned, by two world wars and a long standoff with a rival superpower, to see foreign policy as a mix of cooperation and tension between civilized states. Kerry came to believe, however, that Americans were in greater danger from the more shadowy groups he had been investigating -- nonstate actors, armed with cellphones and laptops -- who might detonate suitcase bombs or release lethal chemicals into the subway just to make a point. They lived in remote regions and exploited weak governments. Their goal wasn't to govern states but to destabilize them.

[...]

Many of Bush's advisers spent their careers steeped in cold-war strategy, and their foreign policy is deeply rooted in the idea that states are the only consequential actors on the world stage, and that they can -- and should -- be forced to exercise control over the violent groups that take root within their borders.

[...]

no one state, acting alone, can possibly have much impact on the threat, because terrorists will always be able to move around, shelter their money and connect in cyberspace; there are no capitals for a superpower like the United States to bomb, no ambassadors to recall, no economies to sanction.

[...]

Such a theory suggests that, in our grief and fury, we have overrated the military threat posed by Al Qaeda, paradoxically elevating what was essentially a criminal enterprise, albeit a devastatingly sophisticated and global one, into the ideological successor to Hitler and Stalin -- and thus conferring on the jihadists a kind of stature that might actually work in their favor, enabling them to attract more donations and more recruits.

So as I was listening to NPR this morning, I got to hear about all the new security precautions at the newly re-opened Statue of Liberty; the signs saying, "If you see something, say something" the new bomb detector that everyone has to go through, the black-clad S.W.A.T. police with assault rifles.

I've never been to the statue, I saw it from a distance in pre-9/11 New York City, but I always figured it would be a tourist trap. I'm sure it was, but as I listened to the radio this morning, I had this feeling that I'll never see the statue the way it was in our youth, let alone what it used to symbolize.

But the real reason I'm writing this blog entry is to share the following quote with you. I don't remember quite who said it, it was a bigwig at the monument, but I had to keep repeating it to myself as I came into work this morning, "Liberty is doing everything you can to protect yourself, your family, and the resources around you. That is what we're doing, that is liberty."

I think the idea is, "What good is liberty if you're not safe" and this somehow changes into, "Safety must come before liberty." I know which I'd choose.

Not to mix religion and politics or anything, but I have two religious points to make, and I'd like to use them to call out those zealots in the Bush administration: 1) You are meant to trust in God and not fear for your safety, and not sin for fear's sake, and 2) freedom comes from God, not from the barrel of a gun.

In S.W.A.T. we trust.

Anna & I wrote a review of Fahrenheit 9/11 for Naked Sunfish (middle column, some way down) called Fahrenheit 9/11 and the Vote Against Bush.

Rather than being a discussion of the movie itself, it's a little analysis of what kind of real-world effects it might have.

Enjoy :)

Went to Michael Moore's new movie Fahrenheit 9/11. I thought it was pretty great, though not quite as good as I had hoped from the preview. The preview was very high-energy, whereas the film dragged on here & there. The audience was very emotional and excited, applauding quite a lot, and a woman next to us cried at a few points.

I may write a more detailed review later.

We came dressed in t-shirts that Dawn made for the occasion. They are based on this image.We got a lot of good feedback on the t-shirts: