Flanfire

Today was a day of reflection -- of years gone by and futures to wonder about. Alcohol and perhaps some pharmaceuticals of a legal kind may have combined to put a friend in jail a while back after she was found by police driving on the wrong side of Burnet Road without lights on late in the evening and then turning onto a side street and hitting a car. She has absolutely no memory of the entire incident, but now she has come to terms with both the legal problems her blackout has caused her and the spiritual problem that the alcohol was masking. Another friend called from California with a "good" report - which in reality means no new bad news. She is living out on a large sheep ranch far from public transportation and without a working vehicle and with no telephone, no Internet, and sometimes not even running water. Another old friend is in the throes of an ugly family breakup that makes no real sense but has roots in some bad things that happened when the husband who was then working for a NASA contractor tried to get attention focused at higher levels that there were some real problems with the space program. Rather than listen to his concerns, NASA blackballed him, and later several of his friends were blown into eternity after the Challenger took off. It is hard to fully recover from such a terrible blow - to know that your warnings were not heeded and that people died as a result.

How many times have I failed to take good advice? How many times have I failed to give it - or to demonstrate how to live right in order to gain credence for what I might have had to say? So now I want to start a new paper for Austin - one that looks at today's divisive issues and tries to find bridges for people to cross to find common ground while they work out their differences on matters of real disagreement. Do we really have to call each other bad names? Would our children approve? Does it make us look powerful and wise - or just afraid that our arguments, our ethical positions, our proposed solutions to the world's problems are woefully inadequate? So do we shout and curse to avoid scrutiny of our own ideas, our own lives?

There is so much honest effort going on here in Austin and elsewhere that needs to be reported - so much creativity that needs to be discovered, but even moreso multiplied. Creative art and music and such, to be sure, but also creativity in teaching hard case children how to become winners in life, helping broken people learn how to build successful llives, cutting through red tape and intransigence in bureaucracies to accomplish changes that really will improve our quality of life, fascinating scientific research endeavors being carried out sometimes by the very young or otherwise outside the scope of normal public scrutiny, and even the work of inventors and much, much more.

The fundamental ethic of this proposed paper would be the building of real community across cultural, racial, political, social, and other lines that divide us as a city, a state, a nation, a world. But real community building need not require us to forfeit our own heritages, our own world views, our own joys and sorrows. It really starts with learning to listen with discretion and learning to express ourselves more clearly.

One idea for example is to look at how well our public and private institutions are really serving us and what we could recommend to improve that service. Another is to learn to recognize why instant gratification does not always produce a positive result down the road -- so that we learn to wait for the best to emerge before we settle for mediocre.

Well, it is late and I digress, but do consider what might be missing from the public discourse in the current collection of Austin newspapers and magazines, and let me know what you would like to see and how you would like to see it covered. Heck, you might even want to become a contributor.