Paradigms...where shift happens!

Red Lake Minnesota

The story was there in the white pine forests of Northern Minnesota before March 21st.

Before Jeff Weise shot and killed his grandfather and 8 other people at Red Lake High School around 3:00 PM Monday, there was a story...it was about a community of about 5,000 souls with an unemployment rate estimated to be as high as 65 percent, a high school graduation rate near 60% and 40% of families living below the Federal Poverty Guidelines.

Few of us knew or cared until people died. It took children’s blood on the floor to attract the press piranhas who have descended on that small community of 5,000 as they scramble for 30 second film clips and sound bites that will be the core of their coverage of the deaths in the remote and reclusive Red Lake community. Certainly, unemployment numbers, poverty levels and drop out rates will be squeezed into the reports but they are numbers you and I would never see if people had not died.

Long after the 3 day wakes are over, long after the grass has started to grow again on new graves, those numerical signs of our failure as a nation to care about the well being of all, will still be there. A year from now, will we even remember what the term “Red Lake” means? Columbine is frozen in our minds, maybe even the stand off at Wounded Knee but what will become of “Red Lake”? Will we remember the unemployment and the people living below the federal poverty level there in Red Lake?

Astonishingly, the Oval Office has thus far been silent on the Red Lake tragedy. I wonder if that silence has something to do with the Administration’s proposed 2006 budget which includes $100,000,000 in cuts for Indian programs including health and education. The sincerity of a hand held out in consolation is a tough sell when the other hand is cutting money from programs designed to help the very people being consoled.

Maybe I just don’t understand what “compassionate conservatism” really means. Is it code for something else?

This is not your father's Oldsmobile...

It occurred to me the other day that this web log, born out of personal stress, seems to have strayed a bit. A couple of writing topics have popped into what passes for my mind in the last two weeks. Since they didn’t really seem to have much if anything to do with relationships I didn’t write about them. Reading over the entries (skimming over, really) I looked for a common thread that might be a “third rail” to run on. The only thing which appears to be a constant is the struggle to cope with change. In the best of all worlds, we would understand and embrace change but for now, coping is enough of a hurdle. Strange as it may sound, the Michael Jackson fiasco is a simple example. Once he was just a popular performer who wore a white glove on one hand and did a fairly cool looking “moon walk” thing that compared pretty well to Chuck Berry’s “duck walk”. That was a pretty unusual look for the time. Did you ever imagine that we might look at that image as a part of the good old days compared to the Michael of today, the pajama clad baby dangler that any sane parent would consider a threat to their kids? Ask Google to define the word “paradigm” and you’ll get nearly two dozen different definitions but all with the same core description, a set of rules that provides a context for understanding and reacting to or with some aspect of life. It’s like a “home base” in a game of tag. You can go back there to gather your wits and plot your next dash to wherever….unless when you get to “home” it’s not there anymore. Someone has moved it and you missed the e-mail about the change. Maybe you even see it move but can’t change directions quickly enough to avoid getting caught off base. You’re thinking about the cost of the war in Iraq and the 1,000 American casualties that was the last number you took notice of and Brian Williams comes on the evening news with the lead story that on the 9th of March the total went over 1500 dead. What happened…somebody moved my home base? Maybe your next thought is that you have another shock coming when the number hits 2,000; your paradigm has shifted. One of the old saws about change is that the only people who like change are wet babies. That’s probably a bit of an overstatement but it is not a bad beginning in thinking about the ways people react to change. When my personal views of how life is or ought to be clash with a fresh reality, I struggle to adjust because it’s a slam dunk certainty that life’s rule book isn’t going to change to be in concert with my views. Do I charge the windmills like Don Quixote or accept that it’s only a windmill and ride on by. Stephen Covey talks about distinguishing between our sphere of influence and our sphere of concern. His advice is to spend more time on “influence” and not so much on “concern.” As attractive and efficient a model as that appears to be, it is much easier to preach than to practice. What if, though, I could find a time and place like this to believe that maybe there really are windmills that are just begging for a good ‘throw caution to the winds, Don Quixote style’ tilt? That would be a good thing, for me at least. I can stay safe and sane in the real world and while having some fun with the absurdity and surrealistic side of life right here. Thus the name change for this accretion of blather and bloviation…it’s an excuse , feeble though it may be, to ramble about with reckless abandon and without a bit of care for the value of your time. Fair warning to the windmills... Beware, you are not safe here! The good news is that some things don’t need to change and among them is my closing thought: That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it….