Franksummers3ba's Blog

I went to see Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps tonight with my parents it was my second time to see it. I also recently went to see the movie The Social Network. Each are films that join the ranks of Eat, Pray, Love this year and countless films from Ghandi to Platoon and Pay it Forward to Syriana in that they were trying to do more than entertain. All these films try to express human truth and plumb moral questions. I think that this is an apropriate thing for a movie to do.

I also have read some books recently from a group of biographical essays called Louisiana Women to Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and been aware of how much moral struggle was involved in creating these books. I am also writing a novel online and I am aware that in addition to plot and character problems and choices I am preoccupied with moral questions and answers.

Last night I watched Macbeth on Louisiana Public Television and was thinking of how Shakespeare plumbs moral questions in that dark tale. I think that morality is something we all must seek to understand and develope ourselves. But in this month of elections and votes I hope that we still as a people morally alive enough to make these decisions well. I think that literature still plays a role in developing that moral sensibility whether in novels, biographies or screenplays.

For the typical race this will be an open primary and the two top vote-getters will be in runoffs in November when the rest of the country votes by and large. The Senate race had a separate primary already and will have narrowed the field to three by party — possibly there will be no majority. Some are running unopposed and so they will be crowned and anointed in the manner of modern Teutonic monarchs tomorrow and some are two person races already and will produce a majority. The Lieutenant Governor, the appellate courts, the varied local races and the public service commissions advertise more than the school boards. But the school board races are big and important tomorrow. Every school board I know of outside New Orleans is electing its leaders tomorrow.

We also have two constitutional amendments on the ballot. One is to place GOHSEP staff in the unclassified civil service category. Another is related to official scheduling of the legislative year.  None of these issues were huge in my mind. I voted early and with less certainty as to how I should vote than usual.  However, I was enthusiastic enough to recommend voting to many people I met at the football game my nephews played in this morning. I posted the first half of this blog post last night and the longer post today feeling just about ready to call this the limit of my electoral involvement.  My precinct only had four items on the ballot after all.

I recently posted a blog post which dealt with misery and the life lived in that sense of unhappiness. This is another exploration of the gloomier side of things. I find that I am doing a lot of things in a few rooms, with a few people and in a few contexts. I find I am less in touch with many people than I used to be and sometimes it saddens me. But most of all I remind myself sometimes of Kerouac at the end of his short life, seldom venturing from his modest family home. The details of our lives are different and yet there is a pattern. There is a great deal of used to be and once upon a time kinds of involvement with life. Nonetheless, there are few changes that have not come with at least some new sliver of new off-setting opportunity. I do believe that since I was a child the odds were always that I would not find the way forward to the future I was seeking. That is true for very many children indeed.  Whatever I do in life it has to involve the fact that I spent a good portion of my life testing and evaluating the limits of people with regards to opposing the vast systems and energies which I regarded as mostly negative, evil and ubiquitous. But the bottom line is that it has been almost decade and a half since I was married.  It has been almost six years since I filed a tax return. It has been five years since I published an article in a newspaper.   In many ways I am now on the far side of a life spent finding ways to interact with the world that no longer form part of my daily experience. So  I am doing a blog post on my own life and where I am in terms of living and doing at various levels.  One thing I am not doing is prospering financially in a very big way.  Of course,  I know a lot of good people who are not. 

A change to smaller change in time I've spent

I am trying to make a move towards the future.  I think that we are as a human race in many ways rushing towards destruction.  I think that in many ways we are avoiding all the courses of action we should most be seeking out. I think that in many ways we are extremely separated from any real hope of things improving. Nevertheless, I try to keep moving forward on a wide front in seeking out a better future and also making a better life for myself. 

My sense of a cause has carried me to many places...

 Teaching, writing in various formats and  engaging in activities that simply consist of maintaining whatever lifestyle I am in have certainly occupied much of my life. I read a lot and have corresponded broadly with a great number of people in very many places.  Nonetheless, my life has largely been a blocked off and horribly distorted life. 

All my nieces & nephews@ the time @ Kissinoaks

I have remained involved in the lives and concerns of my extended family and I believe that maintaining that connection has been worthwhile.  It is something I will keep trying to maintain and through them I both perceive and have an effect upon larger segments of the world. It is not always easy to do nut it is one of my priorities.  My own involvement in family has also been tied to views and concerns about family which are important to me. I am occasionally involved in some effort to promote a view of family which I find better and to strive to make family an experience which has better possibilities. This has me pushing for some issues seen as feminist and against others. For some parts of a traditional conservative agenda and against others. 

Me leading my sisters on a Carabao on Mindanao in the Philippines

 One of the areas of happiest memories for me  is of memories spent with my younger siblings as well as nieces and nephews. However, right now those memories seem fairly remote. I am more concerned than usual with whether I helped prepare them to deal with the evils and struggles my siblings now face as adults and which my nieces and nephew must face at  varying different points in the future. 

 In my life I have seen the awful horrors of almost infinite cowardice over and over again. Among my varied goals in life is to confront the evils, dangers and challenges that must be confronted in as direct and timely a fashion as is possible and not entirely foolhardy. I live surrounded by the ruins of much of what I think matters most.  That is why I must struggle whenever I can to keep everything from becoming ruin.  

My causes have included: 

1. Seeking to be faithful to the legacy of Scripture and promoting a good understanding of it. 

2. I seek to have a real and useful connection with the best of Western Civilization and also learn from other civilizations. 

3,I seek to work towards a more responsible  relationship between humanity and the natural environment than was the one which largely defined our recent past and many other pasts. However, I do not wish to abandon the struggle for progress. 

4. I seek to make a difference in the realm of sexuality, sex, love and family for myself and others. I try to live out of my own base of convictions as regards these matters 

However, these four causes all blend into a certain vision of life and also are accompanied by other causes.  There are many times when an incident like 9-11, Hurricane  Rita or the Macondo  BP oil spill rearrange my thinking so that all of the issues I am concerned with are seen interacting in a single context and are viewed through a single lens.  Then there are times like this time in my life when all of things going on are viewed through a kind of dull gray filter. Some would call it depression based on that one fact but although they are related and I have been depressed there are other complexities to the experience. I am focusing on the sad, negative and problematic right now. I do think that there so very many negative realities that deserve to be understood. Then in addition, I sometimes put all the sad thoughts aside for various good reasons and therefore it may be a balancing act to focus on the dark side some times.  We live a life both in the experience of internal states of mind and engaged with external challenges, forces and actors. 

The world is largely run like hell. I try to change it a little or a lot in the right ways. That is how I sincerely see things. But at this stage in my life it is not a sense of zealous hope that drives me. I am truly exhausted  at a deep interior level. Yet in that basic state of mind which I am choosing to call exhaustion my energy level fluctuates a great deal. There are times when I feel that I am really accomplishing something and am energized by this experience. However, the general trend has been to recognize the extremely low likelihood of making the differences that I never doubt I must commit myself entirely to making when I have anything left to give to the purpose.  

There are times when I am very much in the frame of mind that there is no particular reason not to feel very bad about how things are working out in my life and the world around me. There have been a few time when asked about my life and plansIi have honestly and sincerely replied.” I am aware that life is likely to be an ever-increasing hell beyond fantasy. It is already amazingly horrible. But I have to keep going.” That is a state of mind to get out of as quickly as possible. But I do not believe in the kind of simplistic single form of truth some of my friends who struggle with post modernism believe in out of reaction. Many kinds of truth are universal, relatively speaking. But they cannot all be reduced to a simple single formulation of life experience certainly. 

There have been times when I was really happy. Never in an uncomplicated way that meant that all was right with the world. However, I have been happy enough that the details of the world’s operation did not matter to me much. I hope to be a bit happier soon but today the world appears to me as it has been made by all its many woes and tragedies.

This weekend is the National Book Festival in Washington, DC. This is the book festival most associated with government of our Union. One of my brothers is hosting and my parents and their intake class of missionaries are attending a family conference at the Our Lady of the Bayou Retreat House which Family Missions Company is in the process of acquiring.  I looked over the program for the conference and did some not to be noticed small things to help them get ready for the conference.  However, I will not be attending the conference for myriad reasons. I will not be going to the National Book Festival being held on the National Mall either although I have watched some of it on television  and that includes hearing Former First Lady Laura Bush speak.  I may watch some more of it on television later. I am planning to go to a football game to be contested by my three young nephews. For whatever reason, I will be happy to try to make that work.

This is also a time of year when I remember my only Mid-Autumn Festival in China. This Moon Festival  was  a very special one which left me with more than a dozen really delicious Moon Cakes from friends, students  and  colleagues. This was a great occasion. As I sit in my room still largely marked by Chinese memorabilia there are no Moon Cakes around. All of this is just part of what I am not doing. Not doing these things ought to help me to do other things. I will always do some thing and always leave others undone.

This simple universal condition is the idea behind my blog post today. I may post more tomorrow or even later tonight if I decide not to do something else.